\YESTWAR 




I i 




THE 
COURSE 



OF 



EMPIRE 



MONTGOMERY SCHUYLER 




Class ___f^ 53-5^- 
Book ' S 3 f 



itN»_ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



VT estward the Course 
of Rmpire 

" Out West " and " Back East " 

on the First Trip of the 

"Los Angeles Limited" 



Reprinted^ with Additions^ from the 
New York Times 



By 

Montgomery Schuyler 



G. P. Putnam's Sons 

New York and London 

tibe Iknfcfterbocftcr prc00 
1906 






LIBRARY of CONGRESS 


Two Copies Received 

NOV 15 1906 


w- Copyright Entry 
>Vc^o, ( o, (01 ol 

CLASS A XXc./no. 
' COPY B. 



Copyright, 1906 

BY 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



Ube Iftnfcftetbocftcr press, mew J^orft 



To 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

The Typical American of our Time 

Who is equally at home in all parts of 

Our Country 



PREFATORY NOTE 

My Dear Putnam: 

I am really very much obliged to you 
for calling my attention to Bayard Tay- 
lor's ''El Dorado." It is distinctly my 
loss, and perhaps a little my shame, that I 
was not before, in any detail, aware of its 
existence. If I had had specific knowl- 
edge of the book, I should surely have 
availed myself of that knowledge when I 
arrived upon that lovely California coast 
which Taylor visited fifty-six years before 
me, after a voyage from New York that 
took him four months and a half, and me 
four days! His studies were correspond- 
ingly leisurely, — whereas this booklet 
which you are so gracious as to publish is 
clearly the rapid record of a ''rush." 

You and I both know our "Sparrow- 
grass" and may bear in mind his literary 



IPrefatot^ IRote 



reference to California (I quote from a 
''distant memory," as Mr. Evarts said 
about St. Paul) : 

Know ye the land that looks on Ind ? 

There only you'll find a Pacific sailor — 
Its song has been sung by Jenny Lind, 

And the words were furnished by Bayard Taylor 

It were absurd to compare this hasty 
report with the narrative of Taylor's 
painstaking investigations. But it is a true 
satisfaction to the later and more cursory 
traveler that his report is, as was the 
case with Taylor's volume, to be associ- 
ated with the honored imprint of your 

house. 

Yours faithfully, 

M. S. 
To George Haven Putnam. 



CONTENTS 

Pagb 

Out West 1 

Day First. The Prairies ... i6 

Day Second. The Plains ... 28 

Day Third. The Desert .... 42 

Day Fourth. In the Garden . , ^2 

Day Fifth. Up the Coast ... /J 

Day Sixth. The Golden Gate . gj 

Day Seventh. Over the Range . 10 1 
Day Eighth. The City of the 

Saints 108 

Back East 121 

Considerations by the Way I2y 

Liberty I2p 

Equality Ij8 

Fraternity J6j 

Triumphant Democracy .... /p5 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Los A ngeles L im ited 

Our Guides, Philosophers, and 

Friends 

The Santa Ana Viaduct . 

The Platte in Flood , 

•* To the low last edge of the 

long lone land'' . 
The Devil's Slide .... 

Pulpit Rock 

Ranching in Utah .... 
The Devil's Bridge, Utah . 
Hotel at Riverside .... 
Above the Clouds on Mount Lo-i 
" The House of Roses" . . 
The Bells of San Gabriel . 
A Califorftian Tally-Ho . 
''Extra — Just Out!" . . 
Our Christmas Dimier . 



Frontispiece 
face page 2 

U U JO 

u u i8 

U U JO 



/ 



42, 

44/ 

50. 

56^ 

58 

62' 

J2/ 
126 



"OUT WEST" 



Westward the Course of 
Empire 



The pleasure of your company 
for the initial trip of 

The Los Angeles Limited 

is respectfully requested by the 

Chicago and Northwestern Ry.j 

Ufiion Pacific R. R, 

and 

Salt Lake Route. 

Present this card at the train leaving Wells Street Station, 
C. <5t* N. W. Ry., Chicago, 10.03 P- ■^•. Dec. 17, igoj. 



IN obedience to this summons, 
neatly engraved on steel, your cor- 
respondent, together with some thirty 
other newspaper men, presented him- 
self at the appointed place and time, 



©ut Mest 



all of them but the Chicagoans already 
more or less wayworn with journeys 
from their homes. They were hospi- 
tably received by Messrs. Lomax and 
Darlow of the Union Pacific, by whom 
the whole trip was personally con- 
ducted with a kindness and courtesy 
which were often to be taxed and 
never for a moment to fail for the 
ensuing ten days. 

Doubtless every reader of news- 
papers by now knows that the occa- 
sion was the celebration of the direct 
outlet of the Union Pacific over its 
own road to Southern California. 
Rather over "Senator Clark's road." 
Already the Union Pacific had a prong 
northwestward to Portland, in addi- 
tion to its virtually straight westward 
course to San Francisco. The im- 



•HL. 




OUR GUIDES, PHILOSOPHERS AND FRIENDS 



Westward tbe Course of Bmptte 3 

mense "boom" of Southern California 
made it increasingly desirable, and 
even urgent, that it should have a 
southwestward prong to that rich and 
traffic -bearing region. This it has now 
obtained, as thus : 




Diverging, as you see, at Ogden, the 
new prong stretches out to Los Ange- 
les and San Pedro, the port thereof, 
almost in an air line, not quite so aerial 
in fact, of course, as in the sketch map, 
and there completes the system, by 
the northward connections of the Val- 
ley line and the Coast line, with the 
terminal of the main line at San Fran- 



®ut Ximest 



CISCO. A plain and facile proposition 
on paper. But in fact it has been a 
work of secular accomplishment, in 
which the struggle was not only of 
man with nature, but also, and per- 
haps chiefly, of man with man, of 
''magnate" with magnate. It was 
the Mormons who made the first es- 
says, the Mormons who had their 
little link from Ogden to Salt Lake 
virtually ready when the famous ''last 
spike" was driven on the roadway of 
the Union Pacific, the Mormons who 
even then cherished the hope that they 
would be able to protrude southwest- 
ward a line of railway along "the Old 
Mormon Trail." This was the trail 
that the prudent Brigham Young had 
caused to be broken to the Southwest, 
immediately as an outlet to and an 
inlet from the Pacific, but also ulti- 



Mestwart) tbe Course of Bmptte 5 



mately, no doubt, in prevision of the 
time when the Latter Day Saints 
might be dislodged from the oasis of 
Utah as they had already been dis- 
lodged from the banks of the Missis- 
sippi, where these eyes have seen from 
the steamboat, now many years ago, 
the melancholy dilapidating relics of 
the temple of Nauvoo. The ''pre- 
liminary surveys" for the Clark road 
were made by the Mormon pioneers 
just as truly as the preliminary sur- 
veys for the Union Pacific across the 
plains and through the passes of the 
Rockies were made by those same pio- 
neers. And it is equally strange and 
striking in each case how closely the 
trail of the pioneers has been followed. 
It was in 1847 "that the Mormon pio- 
neers made their way westward across 
the plains to the oasis of Utah. It 



©ut Mest 



was in 1851 that the Mormon ''ex- 
ploring expedition" to the southwest 
of Utah was dispatched. It is a Httle 
more than half a century later that 
the railroad, of which our train is the 
first signal for the opening to trans- 
continental travel, follows in their 
wake. There is no more wonderful 
chapter even in the wonderful story 
of "The Winning of the West." 

Manifest Destiny has long pointed 
out this route to the garden of Cali- 
fornia and the trade of the Pacific. 
''It can safely be stated," says the 
author of the official "Story of a 
Trail," "that not a mile of railway has 
been constructed in Utah south of 
Salt Lake City which has not carried 
the hopes of its builders that sooner 
or later it would become part of a 



TKIlestvvarC) tF^e Course ot lEmptre 7 

line extending from Salt Lake to 
Southern California." The Mormons 
built gradually southward until in 1880 
their road had reached 'Frisco in 
Southern Utah. And it was precisely 
in 1880 that this outlet to the Pacific 
engaged the attention of the powers 
that were of the Union Pacific and 
that a scheme for the ''Salt Lake and 
Western" took shape. But the time 
was not ripe. Eight years later, un- 
der the presidency of Charles Francis 
Adams, the Union Pacific not only had 
accurate surveys made of the Mor- 
mon trail, but graded a roadbed as 
far south as Caliente. But the time 
was not yet propitious. The crash of 
Baring Brothers preluded a tightening 
of the purse strings of the world. Just 
afterward, Jay Gould became the pre- 
siding genius of the Union Pacific. 



Qnt IPdlest 



He, too, had velleities in the direction 
of executing the decrees of manifest 
destiny. But again the time was not 
ripe. He was confronted with the 
terrible Huntington. That mild-man- 
nered old gentleman in his black skull- 
cap by no means made the personal 
impression of a Terror. But, all the 
same, he was a strong man armed, 
keeping his ' ' territory ' ' until a stronger 
than he should come. Jay Gould was 
not that stronger man, and the pro- 
ject languished and lapsed. Truly, it 
seems that it could not have been ac- 
complished before the merger of the 
Union and the Southern Pacific. Then 
again Mormon capital and enterprise 
took up the wondrous tale, and other 
tentatives there were, tentatives 
stretching from San Pedro northeast- 
ward as well as from Salt Lake south- 



XKIle6twar^ tbe dourse ot Bmptre 9 

westward. But the terrible Huntington 
was always there to repel invasion, 
with his private port of Santa 
Monica, so to speak, to oppose to San 
Pedro as a terminus. Collis P. Hunt- 
ington died during the summer of 
1900, and for the hour of his funeral 
no wheel turned on the Southern 
Pacific system. Senator Clark of Mon- 
tana, with his brother as his local 
vicegerent, again projected the com- 
munication between Salt Lake and 
San Pedro, and found himself con- 
fronted with a merger of the Union 
and the Southern and the Oregon 
Short Line, which supplies the link 
between Ogden and Salt Lake City, 
and which had its own connections 
with the failures and its own claims 
upon their assets. Then ensued an- 
other battle of the giants, the issue 



10 Qnt Ximest 



being narrowed to the control of the 
pass in Nevada known as the ' ' Meadow 
Valley Wash," a pass quite indispens- 
able to through operation. This issue 
was brought into the courts and pub- 
licly debated. But the battle of the 
giants was chiefly, all the same, a con- 
fidential contest, a duel in the dark, 
in which the threat of independent 
operation on the one side is supposed 
to have been met by the threat of the 
deadly parallel on the other. It lasted 
from 190O3 when Senator Clark came 
forward to finance the Salt Lake route 
from Salt Lake City to San Pedro, till 
it was ended in 1902 by a treaty of peace 
and amity between the Senator and Mr. 
Harriman, whereby the claims of the 
Oregon Short Line south of Salt Lake 
were to pass to the Salt Lake route, 
and the two ''systems" were to con- 



Mestwarb tbe Course of Empire n 

struct on joint account the line from 
Caliente in Nevada to Dagget in Cali- 
fornia, to reconstruct and jointly oper- 
ate the Pacific link from Riverside to 
San Bernardino while there was to be 
a joint operation with the Santa F6 
over the ninety miles from Dagget to 
Colton, where a so-called paralleling 
would really have involved a wide 
detour, even though the actual arrange- 
ment threatened chronic friction. Even 
so, construction was confronted with en- 
gineering obstacles sufficiently serious, 
the most conspicuous being the bridg- 
ing of the Santa Ana, a watercourse 
which is now a rill and now a raging 
torrent, and which is spanned by the 
most monumental feature of the line, 
the viaduct of a dozen arches in con- 
crete, ''reinforced concrete," one sup- 
poses, each of impressive dimensions. 



12 ®ut mc5t 



The first train, an official train, passed 
over the Hne last February. The first 
regular interchange of trains between 
the termini occurred last May, while the 
first attempt really to incorporate 
the new line in the general system of 
transcontinental passenger traffic is 
betokened by this Los Angeles Lim- 
ited of which we are to take the initial 
trip. It is this line, twenty-four hours 
in time, something over seven hundred 
miles as the crow flies, and much 
nearer eight hundred as we go, that we 
have specifically " come out for to see." 
The layman has a very imperfect 
notion of what the establishment of a 
new daily transcontinental service in- 
volves or what faith in the future it 
implies. On his limited train to Bos- 
ton, to Washington, or even to Chi- 
cago, he meets his counterparting train 



XKDlestwar^ tbe Course of Bmptre 13 

whizzing past, at the conjoint rate of 
a hundred miles or more, and may 
vaguely •conjecture that there is a spare 
train in reserve somewhere, at the end 
or in the middle. But the three-day 
trip across the continent is a very dif- 
ferent matter. It involves, as a matter 
of fact, nine trains in actual operation 
across the continent, going or return- 
ing, and a complete emergency train 
held in reserve at either end, or eleven 
trains in all. Each, like this of ours, 
composes itself of two or three Pull- 
man sleepers, of a dining car on occa- 
sions, and of the combined smoker and 
buffet, observation car, and library 
which is the novelty of the equipment, 
the buffet smoker, rather more than 
half the length of the car being screened 
off with glass from the passage along- 
side, so that the ladies may resort to 



14 ®ut Mest 



the observatory in the rear with their 
auditory and olfactory nerves, if not 
their optic nerves, protected from the 
unholy rites within. For the purposes 
of this journey, a typewriter was in- 
stalled at the writing desk in the ob- 
servatory, though nobody used it, 
everybody betaking himself, for his 
literary occasions, to the stenographer 
and mimeographer in the baggage car 
away forward. 

One has scarcely time for these ob- 
servations and reflections before it is 
time to turn in, with benedictions, not 
only with Sancho Panza, upon the in- 
ventor of sleep, but upon the inventor 
of nocturnal darkness. But for the 
nightly dropping of the curtain upon 
the scenery one's progress westward 
would be but a bewildering blur of 
composite impression. Whereas one 



Mestwarb tbe Course of Empire is 

finds in the outlook, and still more in 
the retrospect, that the nightly curtain 
happily divides the panorama into as 
many tableaux as there are days' jour- 
neys, of each of which he retains some 
coherent recollection, and can render 
at least to himself some coherent 
account. Shall he call his account, 
''Westward the Course of Empire: In 
Eight Tableaux"? Meanwhile, as he 
wraps the drapery of his Pullman about 
him, with the train whizzing westward 
into the dark at fifty miles an hour, 
he drowsily recalls : 

The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass, 
And the Deuce knows what we may do — 
But we're out once more on the Old Trail, 

Our Own Trail, the Out Trail, 
We're down, hull down, on the Long Trail, 

The Trail that is always new. 



Day First 
THE PRAIRIES 

When we turn out, we have already 
left the Mississippi far behind, and 
are traversing the flat, fertile prairies 
of Iowa. Three hours of this rich 
alluvium by daylight. Interminable 
wastes of stubble, scattered farmsteads, 
unpretentious abodes of rude plenty, 
of comfort and independence, monoto- 
nous to the eye though so deeply im- 
pressive to the mind, before we come 
to the Missouri, to which we confi- 
dently look for a feature in the feature- 
less landscape. It is hardly so. The 
expanse of yellow ooze is as monoto- 
nous as the expanse of yellowish 
stubble which it divides. One cannot 

i6 



Ube ipratries 17 

conceive a painter whom it would 
attract to reproduce it. 

Truly, the huge, gaunt railroad 
bridge which spans it, and gives ac- 
cess to bustling Omaha, is more im- 
pressive than itself. And this we find 
to be the keynote of the day. Man 
has molded and ennobled nature. 
Lewis and Clark, Bonneville, Catlin, 
any of the pioneers who passed this 
way, would find nothing to regret in 
the aspect of things if he should pass 
this way again, but quite the contrary. 
One scarcely loses the Missouri be- 
fore he comes upon the Platte, that 
stream of which one scorner has said 
that it would make a negotiable river 
if it were set on edge, and another that 
it could be sucked up at low water 
with a sheet of blotting paper. The 
Platte ''Valley" is a fiat expanse. 



®ut Wicst 



bounded by hills faint and blue and 
low and distant, seemingly some ten 
miles on each side. They gradually 
decline as we go westward, and the 
river, with its vast and lazy and un- 
explained meanderings, though we en- 
counter it now and again, only pres- 
ently to lose it, and to mark its course 
by low growths of osier, is not a fea- 
ture. The landscape would be quite 
featureless if man did not come to the 
rescue of nature. But these treeless 
prairies are no longer treeless. Fringes 
of trees take the place of the clumps 
by the river we have for the moment 
mislaid. About every homestead there 
are groves, groves to delight the heart 
of the Beaux Artist, for they are as 
evidently plantations, as plainly the 
result of art and man's device, and, 
moreover, as ''regularly laid out" as 



Ube pratrtes 19 

the avenues of Le Notre at Versailles, 
and doubtless, to the expert, dating 
themselves within a year, according to 
their growth, taller, apparently, and 
more abounding, certainly, the further 
west we go. And the crops! The 
mile-square cornfields, the house-big 
haystacks for which there is no room 
in the barns. ''Scots wha ha'e!" as 
poor Jim Davis used indignantly to 
exclaim. ''Why, there is more hay 
weighed in one county in Illinois than 
in all Scotland." And, a fortiori, in 
one county in Nebraska, one would say, 
judging by what he sees. House-big 
heaps, also, of corn, sometimes shelled, 
sometimes in the ear. Great herds of 
cattle, great "bunches" of horses, great 
droves of swine. But one flock of 
sheep so far, but what a flock! What 
myriads of dingy fleeces and silly faces! 



©ut XPdlest 



Statistics have their uses, and there 
are inflammable imaginations they 
really kindle. It is very well to read 
that Nebraska yields a million tons of 
hay and 360,000,000 bushels of grain, 
260 of these millions being of corn ; very 
well, too, to read that the States served 
by the Union Pacific produce 51 per 
cent of the farm animals raised in the 
United States. But to vitalize these 
figures and make their dry bones live 
you must come out here and traverse 
the State as we are doing, and let the 
consciousness of what it all means 
sink into you mile after mile, until, 
as Charles Reade has it, ''you com- 
prehend the meaning of the word ac- 
cumulation," the meaning not only 
nor mainly as to vegetable products, 
or animal products, but also as to 
citizenship. The prairie farmer is com- 



TLbc prairies 21 

monly held to lead but a dismal ex- 
istence. His historiographer, Mr. 
Hamlin Garland, takes that view of 
his lot. But at least he has his inter- 
ests, and even that secure source of 
joy which is involved in having his 
hobbies. Every farmer whose farm 
we pass seems to have his specialty, 
whether it be Herefords, draught 
horses, highly specialized sheep, or 
swine, white or black. He is a ''col- 
lector" and a competitor, and every 
farmstead has the look of a section of 
a county fair. Surely this is some- 
thing for that interest in life inexpres- 
sible by statistics, as well as for that 
material comfort of which the statis- 
tics tell the tale. "High-Class Bel- 
gians and Percherons" is one of the 
advertisements we pass in a country 
in which everything seems to be ad- 



22 ®ut Mest 



vertised for sale, excepting only fer- 
tilizers. Their day is a long way off, 
as one perceives when he sees along- 
side acres of grayish -yellow stubble 
acres of fresh furrow cut in the black 
loam. Farm land here, one tells me, 
is $75 an acre, as against $50 in that 
part of New England I know best. 
To recur to the animals, the cow is 
regarded in these parts as primarily a 
beef bearing animal, as was inevitable. 
''On the range" she is exclusively so. 
The Hereford, in a dehorned state, 
seems to be the standard beefif er of 
these plains, Holsteins and Jerseys 
and Alderneys and the other lactifers 
being conspicuous by their compara- 
tive absence. It is true that of late 
Nebraska has been taking an advanced 
stand in dairy products, and I should 
like to quote you the statistics which 



Ube iPrairies 23 

I have had and mislaid. But it re- 
mains true that Bos is chiefly Beefifer. 
' ' These farmers are mostly ' feeders, ' ' ' 
says the expert near me. Which is 
to say that they buy cattle on the 
range to the westward and southward 
and fatten them on the farm, thus 
marketing their own corn crops ''on 
the hoof" and in the most convenient 
and economical way. This, of course, 
does not apply to the Herefords or 
other fancy cattle, whether their 
specialty be beef or milk and butter 
and cheese. Neither do I know what 
advantage the black pig may be sup- 
posed to possess over the white, ex- 
cepting picturesqueness, and even that 
is disputable. We meet carloads of 
both kinds grunting eastward on the 
way to dusty death. As the early 
cattle of the plains were primarily 



24 ®ut Idlest 



beefiferous, so the early sheep were 
primarily lanigerous. An agriculturist 
explains to me that they have now 
imported or developed a ''combina- 
tion sheep," so to say, which is entitled 
to high and equal respect for his fleece 
and for his mutton, but I have for- 
gotten his name. 

At any rate, I reject with scorn the 
suggestion of a cynical neighbor and 
co-spectator that theNebraskan farmer, 
paying so much intelligent attention 
to the breed of his other domestic 
animals, should devote some of it to 
his own breed. He has a slack and 
lounging look, perhaps, the Nebraska 
farmer, as you see him at the stations 
or pass him on the fields. But he is 
the cunning creature whose work we 
have been admiring all day. We have 



XTbe iPratrtes 25 

been riding through 400 miles of Tri- 
umphant democracy. It is a land of 
social as well as of topographical 
equality. We have not seen one house 
which could arouse envy or enmity, 
except in a very mean breast, for we 
have not seen one beyond the reach 
of any honest, industrious, frugal citi- 
zen. The land is flowing with milk 
and honey, but individually the tillers 
of it seem to have that happy lot of 
neither poverty nor riches. Surely 
we have seen no evidence of luxury 
on the one side or of squalor on the 
other. The stateliest buildings of 
these rural parts are the schoolhouses. 
Against the fence of one of them we 
saw two buggies hitched and standing 
to take the children home! lo Tri- 
umphe! One is almost inclined, in 
the increasing patriotic enthusiasm 



26 ©ut IKHest 



with which this cumulative spectacle 
of comfort and independence inspires 
him, to believe with Walt Whitman 
that the best way to celebrate ''these 
States" is his way of cataloguing and 
ejaculation. Certainly it is the easi- 
est. But as the dark draws in and 
shuts out a continuance of the monoto- 
nous scene of prosperity one recalls a 
more coherent eulogy in the lines of 
George Alfred Townsend's poem, read 
before the Society of the Army of the 
Potomac : 



Deep the wells of humble childhood, cool the 
spring beside the hut ; 

Millions more as poor as Lincoln see the door 
he has not shut. 

Not till wealth has put its canker every poor 
white's cabin through 

Shall the Great Republic wither, or the in- 
fidel subdue! 



Zbc prairies 27 

Stand around your great commander, lay 

aside your little fears! 
Every Lincoln carries Freedom's car along a 

hundred years. 
And when next the call for soldiers rolls along 

the golden belt 
Look to see a mightier army rise and march, 

prevail, and melt. 

And the morning and the evening 
were the first day. 



Day Second 
THE PLAINS 

One wakes to look out on huge rocks 
alongside the track, with the sem- 
blance of ruined towers and fantastic 
features of castellated architecture on 
their eroded summits, and finds him- 
self tempted to add to the silly nomen- 
clature whereby nature is degraded 
by the tourist in these parts, the Bridal 
Veils and Devil's Teapots and what 
not. The semblance is, however, in 
this case, as in so few others, so strik- 
ing as to occur without being sought, 
and the fallen towers and crumbling 
battlements do really suggest the 
handiwork of moldering and forgotten 

men. But this is very transient. 
28 



Zbc plains 



Presently form and comeliness vanish, 
and color also. Amorphous lumps of 
rock of a lava gray. Fancy the cara- 
pace of a rhinoceros in the thickness 
of its lumpy folds, but in its hue the 
hide of a dirty elephant, stretched by 
the mile along the roadway. The 
vegetation bears about the same pro- 
portion to the rocky epidermis that 
the sparse tufts of hair on an unkempt 
elephant would bear to his hide. It 
is of the dingy sage brush, with occa- 
sional speckles of white sage, and 
bunch grass of an unwholesome sallow. 
From morning to almost noon the 
gray wastes spread, with no relief but 
what is furnished by these tufts, and 
by the streaks of snow that nowhere 
form a carpet, or even a rug, but 
simply lie in the wrinkles of the pachy- 
derm. And distance lends no en- 



30 Qnt Wicst 



chantment. There is no grace of form 
or charm of color on the summits of 
the horizon, nay, no summits, for the 
skyHne is a level ridge, ''to the low 
last edge of the long, lone land." In 
a hundred miles only one conical hill- 
top in sight. This is the abomination 
of desolation spoken of by Daniel the 
Prophet. Nothing but some antedi- 
luvian and arctic saurian, you would 
say, could live here. And yet, along 
the folds of the monster's hide you see 
cattle and sheep grazing and grub- 
bing for a living, cropping the white 
sage and bunch grass for meat, licking 
up the streaks of snow for drink. 
They tell you that these are not in 
fact the Bad Lands of Wyoming, and 
you wonder what the lands can be 
that are worse. The features of the 
landscape, even, such as they are, are 



Ubc plains 31 



not the works of nature, but of man, 
the queer contorted sections, segments, 
parallels, Echelons, salients, and re- 
entrants of close rail fence which serve 
as snowbreaks instead of the former 
discarded sheds. From the car win- 
dow their disposition looks perfectly 
random. But they are in fact placed 
precisely where costly experience of 
many snowstorms dictates, though 
where no anemologist, if there be such 
a word or thing, could have dreamed 
of placing them on theory. 

*'God has forgotten it," is what the 
neighbors of this uninhabitable land 
are in the habit of saying about it. 
Certainly man has shunned it. We 
see no signs of human habitation ex- 
cept the huts that shelter the section 
hands of our railroad, though we may 



32 ©ut Mest 



infer human proximity from the cattle 
and the sheep. ''On God's frontiers 
we seem to be." And it seems as it 
were blasphemous and heaven-defying 
that we should be traversing a for- 
bidden country with every circum- 
stance of the luxury of travel which 
can be had anywhere. The Easterner 
naturally expects to find in the wilder- 
ness some traces of the rawness and 
roughness of pioneering in his rail- 
roading, compared with longer and 
more thickly settled regions. There 
are absolutely none. The train, of 
course, is perfectly up to date in its 
appointments, indeed, in some respects 
in advance of date. For one thing, it 
is the most brilliantly lighted train, 
notably in the dining car and the com- 
posite car, but in the sleepers also, on 
which I have ever ridden. With the 



Ube plains 33 



chandeliers overhead and the brackets 
alongside, the incandescent bulbs make 
our nightly dinner a really dazzling 
scene. And you can read or write 
anywhere. But one looks for a rough 
roadbed, for example, and one finds 
one as smooth as ever cars spun over 
"down the ringing grooves of change.'* 
You can shave, for example, in com- 
plete security and comfort at fifty 
miles an hour, and by '' you" I do not 
mean the user of a safety razor — that 
Man with a Hoe can glean his stubble 
anywhere — but the user of a real 
razor, ' ' putting his sickle to the perilous 
grain" with no consciousness of peril. 
The smoothness is such that the differ- 
ence between forty miles an hour and 
sixty is scarcely perceptible and not at 
all noticeable if you do not look out of 
the window. For the smoothness, and 



34 Qnt Mest 



for the dustlessness, which is equally 
complete, it seems that the Union Pa- 
cific is indebted to what is called the 
''Sherman gravel," but what, it seems, 
is not a gravel at all, but a disintegrated, 
or rather an inchoate granite, found in 
inexhaustible quantities along this 
desolate tract we have been traversing. 
If this terrible land produces nothing 
else, it produces the perfection of 
''ballast." And, indeed, there are 
other mineral products of value. As 
we go on, heaps of black sif tings de- 
note coal, the reddening rocks may 
betoken iron, and, on the horizon's 
rim to the northwest, skeleton towers 
indicate oil wells. 



It is pleasant to know that the 
"conditores imperii," for such surely 
were the builders of the Union Pacific, 



XTbe plains 35 



were by no means so black as they 
have been painted. Congressional in- 
vestigation, instigated by a press 
which it must be owned has not in all 
the world its equal in a scent for 
scandal, has done a good deal of black- 
ening. But the Oakes Ames monu- 
ment, which it seems we passed in the 
night, well deserves salutation. One 
ancient scandal, that the road was bent 
and even zigzagged, to draw enlarged 
subsidies per mile where construction 
was easy, has lately been effectually 
dispelled. The Union Pacific has 
undertaken, with its modern appli- 
ances and its modern affluence of 
means, to straighten its road and ease 
its curves and its grades all along the 
line. Such things are necessary and 
inevitable, of course, in a country in 
which the railroad is the pioneer road, 



36 ®Ut WiCSt 



and betterments are left to be paid for 
out of earnings. Well, the fact is 
that the modern engineers with their 
new lights and their new means have 
managed in this country here to save 
just four miles in four hundred over 
the engineers of the sixties, a fact 
which ought to excite much blushing 
in many editorial rooms. There are 
other pioneers to whom w-e are forced, 
however unwillingly, to do honor here, 
the Mormon pioneers, to wit, who 
traversed this desert sixty years ago, 
and whose vestiges we are following 
with curious exactness, for the line 
which modern experience can do so 
little to rectify is almost precisely the 
Mormon trail of 1847. Senator Smoot, 
a man of dignified and attractive pres- 
ence and interesting discourse, is one 
of our fellow-passengers, and he tells 



XTbe plains 37 



us that his father and mother, in 1847, 
spent eight weary and perilous weeks 
in traversing the ''Great American 
Desert," between the Missouri and the 
basin of the Great Salt Lake, which 
we are accomplishing in twenty-nine 
hours, comforting themselves, doubt- 
less, as the Plymouth Pilgrims on the 
ocean three hundred years before, and 
the Israelite pilgrims in the wilderness 
uncounted centuries before that, with 
the promise ''to bring them up out 
of that land into a good land and a 
large, unto a land flowing with milk 
and honey." Nay, we are presently 
to take on board a Mormon patriarch, 
a monogamous patriarch, I hasten to 
explain, and not even so very patri- 
archal, going over to spend his Christ- 
mas with his family in San Bernardino, 
who has himself as a boy crossed the 



38 ®ut Mest 



plains three times with an ox team. 
Oak and triple brass were around the 
hearts of these later pioneers as around 
those of the earlier. Nobody can pass 
over their track without admitting 
them to the class of Columbus. **But 
that is another story." 

One takes to thinking when there 
is nothing to look at. But we are 
coming to where our eyes are busy. 
Little Evanston is a great relief to the 
eyes and mind, a true oasis, with its 
winding stream bordered with pearl- 
gray leafless trunks and twigs of birches 
and crimson clumps of osier. And the 
mountains begin to take on form and 
comeliness and dignity and elevation. 
It is not long before we are in the Echo 
Cafion, which is the vestibule of Utah, 
surely one of the grandest vestibules 




THE DEVIL S SLIDE 



Ubc plains 39 



that nature ever set between a scene 
of mere ruin and desolation and a 
smiling valley. It is a cleavage in the 
Wasatch Range, sentineled on one 
hand by that Pulpit Rock from which 
the Mormon Moses is said to have 
harangued his people just before their 
entrance to the promised land, and 
on the other, not far away, by the 
gigantesque and grotesque ''Devil's 
Slide," a sheer rift 800 feet high, 
flanked by huge lips of naked granite. 
Excessive and Gargantuan freaks of 
nature! I rather sympathized with 
that member of our party who, con- 
doled with on not being able to see the 
Garden of the Gods and the Royal 
Gorge and the other scenic wonders of 
Colorado, made answer that he had 
seen Echo Canon, which attained the 
limits of the scenically permissible, 



40 ©ut West 



and that anything beyond that he did 
not wish to see, being certain before- 
hand that it would be ' ' in bad taste ! ' ' 

Some miles of this defile, with 
momentary shifts of scene, according 
to the windings of the road and the 
convolutions of the mountains, and 
we come upon Ogden and civilization, 
typified by the seemly station and the 
thriving town. And we are off again 
for Salt Lake City and the beginning 
of the end of our journey. There is 
light enough to see that this was indeed 
the Canaan of the Mormon pioneers, a 
land flowing with water, which in these 
regions means milk and honey and all 
other worldly goods, though the water 
again is brought where it is needed 
by art and not by nature. Endless 
avenues of the Lombardy poplar, 





PULPIT ROCK 



TLM plains 41 



which looks so queerly old-fashioned 
to the Easterner, cottonwoods thereto; 
huge haystacks, as one would say, but 
in truth of the alfalfa, which is the hay 
of these parts, and shows green, like 
ensilage, in the heart of the brown - 
skinned stacks ; rows on rows of leafless 
but yet hearty-looking fruit trees, 
though no sign now of the tomatoes 
the canning of which is the leading 
industry of the valley. And so for the 
forty miles to Salt Lake City, where 
the thickening December dusk only 
allows us a glimpse of the six -horned, 
lofty, gleaming Temple and the turtle- 
back of the Tabernacle, before the 
brief December daylight is done, and 
we are off again on the last stretch of 
our journey. 

And the morning and the evening 
were the second day. 



Day Third 
THE DESERT 

That twitch of the window shade 
which marks the beginning of a new 
day on a Pullman reveals that we have 
been reaching during the night a 
different clime from that in which we 
went to bed. Plainly, ''we're sagging 
south on the Long Trail." The first 
thing one clearly makes out is a canvas 
camp, apparently of a construction 
gang, three or four big wall-tents 
which would not be eligible lodgings 
so near Christmas, even in the mild 
Salt Lake Valley, and near by a mess 
tent, this time of wood, with xhe pro- 
hibition chalked on the door, "No 
Meals Sold Here." It is not long be- 
42 



XTbe Desert 43 



fore the spreading roofs and overhang- 
ing eaves of Las Vegas remind us not 
less than its tropical name that we are 
within the zone of Spanish settlement. 
The station is not only distinctly 
in the ''Mission" architecture, but 
also, like all the buildings of the San 
Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake 
Company, even to the great viaduct 
of the Santa Ana, it is in concrete. 
Why not? Concrete, if thick enough, 
is impervious to the heat from which 
alone man requires shelter in these 
parts. The sand costs nothing but a 
willing mind and a shovel, and the 
cement, from the ''coast," also boasts 
itself to be of extreme cheapness. The 
station buildings are in fact the fea- 
tures of the line, which presently has 
no other. For presently we come to 
"old hushed Egypt and its sands," 



44 ©V\t West 



under the name of the Mohave Desert, 
as featureless as the sea, and ride 
through it for what seems an inter- 
minable time, though in truth our 
route is shortest of all the roads which 
traverse it. Sage brush carpets it 
save where, as mostly, the floor of 
sand is uncovered. Huge cacti con- 
stitute its other vegetation. The 
Uvada Canon, the scenic feature of 
our route, we passed in the darkness, 
"Uvada," at this end of Nevada, like 
' ' Calada ' ' at the other, being an artful 
compound, like ''Texarkana," to de- 
note a border town. Our route is 
almost terra incognita, except to the 
prospector. That unhappy man, wan- 
dering these waterless wastes and ply- 
ing his ''dreadful trade," may count 
himself lucky if he returns with his 
life, let alone with promising ''speci- 




THE DEVIL'S BRIDGE, UTAH 



XTbe Desert 45 



mens," from this dismal scene, where 
the delusions of the mirage lure him 
to his doom. ''Death Valley," which 
we presently enter, attests the dangers 
of the region. Close at hand, nothing 
but the cacti and the sage brush and 
the sand. But to the north and 
marching parallel with our course the 
bald, gray, treeless, grassless range of 
the gold-bearing mountains, serrated 
and gnarled and wrinkled, but never 
scarped, holds out the promise of a 
richer crop than the most fertile valley 
grows, and men point out along its 
face the scenes of lucky finds. We 
pass in sight, too, of another deposit 
richer than the richest crop, the mine, 
quarry, bed, or what not of that borax 
the transportation of which by forty- 
mule power none of us can have es- 
caped seeing represented. Ten miles 



46 ©ut West 



at most away one would say the 
mountains were, but in this desiccated 
air it seems that they are in fact thirty. 
Heaps of corded tin cans and bottles 
along the track, neatly piled, doubt- 
less by railway gangs under orders, 
instead of being flung broadcast, beer 
bottles, one naturally suspects, but 
quite possibly water bottles, since 
none can venture on this desert with- 
out bringing his own supply, and the 
railroads that cross it have a ''freight 
rate" for water like any other car- 
riageable commodity, and all workmen 
are on an allowance. The piles are, 
at any rate, the only visual objects in 
the foreground of the picture, except 
the cactus. Strange and monstrous 
some of the cacti are. What do you 
say, for instance, to a prickly red 
cucumber six feet long and two feet 



XTbe Desert 47 



thick? What manner of men could 
have endured to build this railway 
over this desert, when the torrid 
summer added to its terrors? ''In- 
dians, Mexicans — and Greeks," they 
tell you, and also that the Indian's is 
often a more trustworthy labor than 
the Mexican's. What a country! 
But even here the invincible American 
optimism prevails. ''When you come 
this way again, you will see oranges 
and roses." "But where will they get 
the water?" "Oh, I dunno. But 
they'll get it." Meanwhile there is 
perhaps a less illusory hope in the 
announcement that the astonishing 
Mr. Burbank is on the verge of success 
in producing a cactus without thorns, 
so that it may be despoiled of its 
stored moisture, and with an edible 
fruit! We pass the "shack" of 



48 Qnt Mest 



*'Scotty," who is next day to be re- 
ported missing. Scotty the private 
prospector and finder of a private mine 
in the mountains, who pays himself 
for his hardships and perils by grossly 
squandering his gold in Los Angeles, 
on ''forty dollars' worth of ham and 
eggs," like another Coal Oil Johnny, 
and in the intervals of his labors and 
his orgies inhabits a hovel to which a 
considerate owner would be loath to 
consign his dog. And now the cacti 
become more luxuriant and more 
abundant, so as to constitute what 
one might call cactus orchards rather 
than gardens. And now we pass 

along the strip of Herbage strewn 
That just divides the desert from the sown 

and are almost within hail of San 
Bernardino, '' the Garden Gate," when 



ttbe Desert 49 



the pleasures are presented to us of 
''joint operation" between rival roads. 
Hitherto we have been not merely up 
to but ahead of time at every stop, 
and our watchword has become, ''The 
time is easy." But now we find our- 
selves brought down to a crawl, and 
at last to a standstill, by the lagging 
of the trains of the rival A., T. and S. 
ahead of us, and the railroad men fume 
and say unpleasant things, and we 
begin to fear that we shall have to cut 
the banquet spread for us at Riverside. 
When we are at last released, the ban- 
quet is quite out of the question, but 
we come upon a jumble of three 
wrecked cars alongside. As a guaran- 
tee of good faith, the destruction ap- 
pears to be unimpeachable, but it does 
not satisfy our expert Thomases, who 
insist that with the steam derrick that 



50 ®Ut West 



was available, a freight car should 
have been swung clear of the track in 
ten minutes, and even a locomotive 
in twenty. Dusk is already thicken- 
ing, and a little spatter of rain falling, 
the first we have seen or are to see, as 
we pass San Bernardino. The baffled 
host of Riverside makes himself and 
us what amends he may by loading us 
as we pass with basket after basket of 
the gorgeous blossoms, gigantic gera- 
niums and the like, which assure us 
that we are at last in the garden of 
California and of the world, and we 
arrive at Los Angeles at last long after 
dark, and amid invisible surroundings. 
Miracles are commonplaces on the 
second day, and "chestnuts" on the 
third. But I cannot divest myself of 
wonder at reflecting that I might have 
seen the sun rise out of the Atlantic 



XTbe Desert 51 



last Saturday morning, and set in the 
Pacific this Wednesday evening. 

One sweetly solemn thought 
Comes to me o'er and o'er; 

I'm further West to-night 
Than I have been before. 



Day Fourth 
IN THE GARDEN 

The hospitality of Los Angeles has 
laid out for us a very strenuous day, 
so strenuous that of Los Angeles itself 
we have only such random glimpses 
as we can snatch on our way this 
morning to the trolley station, which 
is the point of departure for our ex- 
cursion, and this evening on the way 
back from it to our hotel in the twilight. 
It seems rather a pity, especially for 
one who has determined to break loose 
from the programme to-morrow and 
go up the coast to San Francisco by 
himself, aided and advised in his pro- 
ject by the united railroading wisdom 
of the coast. The City of the Angels, 
52 



Uhc Garden 53 

the hustling American hastily abbre- 
viates its name. One wishes he had 
not clipped it, but had kept the whole 
long-tailed and mellifluous designa- 
tion, "Pueblo de la Reina de los 
Angeles," ''Town of the Queen of the 
Angels," which was the tribute to its 
fascinations of the Spanish settlers of 
1 78 1. Half way or so between the 
mountains and the sea — the latter 
never in sight, the former never out 
of it — the high wall of the Sierra 
Madre, which makes the desert of 
yesterday by cutting off from it the 
moisture that combines with the per- 
petual sunshine to make a garden in 
bloom all the year round of this stretch 
between its westward slope and the 
ocean. One admonishes us to take our 
overcoats, apologizing for the unusual 
rigor of the weather, a rigor on the 



54 ®ut Mest 



eve of Christmas like to the rigor of a 
sunny day in early May on Man- 
hattan. In this favored region the 
extreme range of temperature is 65 
degrees; the difference between the 
mean of the hottest and the coldest 
month is less than 20 degrees, from 
51 degrees in March to 70.6 degrees in 
August. How odd that no Angelican 
could tell me the latitude, and that I 
had to wait for the infallible Stieler in 
order to find out that Los Angeles is 
virtually on the parallel and also on 
the isotherm of Wilmington, N. C. 

The trolley station is not at all the 
sort of edifice which its name would 
connote to the Eastern or even to the 
Middle Western ear. It is the central 
ganglion of precisely the most com- 
plete and comprehensive system of 



TLbc (Barben 5S 

interurban and suburban electric com- 
munication which any of us can ever 
have had the chance of seeing, and it 
is quite worthy of its function, one of 
the most conspicuous of the business 
buildings of the town, with its nine 
stories and its ample area, the ground 
floor given over to the uses of the elec- 
tric road, mainly as a huge waiting 
room furnished with all the conven- 
iences of a terminal station of a great 
trunk line, and indeed more com- 
pletely furnished than more than one 
such terminal of which I wot. And 
we find a very special conductor, Mr. 
McMillin, to wit, the superintendent 
of the ''system" which ramifies all 
over this region, from its port of Santa 
Monica, twenty miles oif to seaward, 
to its eyrie at Mount Lowe, two-thirds 
or so up toward the crest of the Sierra 



s6 ©ut Mest 



Madre and well above low clouds. We 
find also a very special car, half fitted 
with seats for the habituated, half 
open as an observatory for the 
stranger, which latter half, being 
planted with camp stools, makes the 
whole quite capable of holding in com- 
fort the forty -odd passengers to which 
our party by local accessions has ex- 
panded. 

Our first station was San Gabriel 
Mission. How far it is from Los 
Angeles I have only the vaguest notion. 
What I recall is that, when the sur- 
roundings were comparatively dull, 
we accelerated to fifty, yes, sixty miles 
an hour. Sixty miles an hour on a 
trolley? Yes; and why not, if you 
have had the wise and far-sighted 
liberality of the Pacific Electric, and 



Ube Garden S7 



have acquired your private right of way 
instead of running over the pubHc high- 
ways, so that you are not reduced, as 
you would be in an automobile or an 
uncharted trolley car, to the risk of 
murdering your hapless fellow-man in 
your mad career ? And how can I help 
recalling, also, that the place through 
which we passed ''was called Gan 
Eden, or the Garden of Delight"? 
Soothly, this is the Arabian Nights 
come true. Roses in December, un- 
failing verdure, perpetual summer — 
''boon nature" can no further go. 
But also the advantage that that cun- 
ning creature, man, has taken of her 
bounty! These places that we whizz 
by are homes, homes equally, and it is 
often difficult to tell, whether they be of 
those who make their livings elsewhere, 
and are here in "villeggiatura," or of 



58 (S)ut imcst 



those suburbans who make their Hv- 
ings in the ''Town of the Queen of 
the Angels," and resort hither only 
at nightfall. 

In either case, all honor to our Span- 
ish predecessors. One shudders to 
think what would have happened if the 
otiose Spaniard had left this country 
to be discovered, as well as exploited, 
by the hustling Yankee. ' ' There is no 
vulgarity in Mexico," Clarence King 
used to say. Whose merit is it but 
that of the Spaniard that there is no 
vulgarity in Southern California ? The 
Spanish missions have furnished to the 
American exploiter a keynote upon 
which, for the benefit of all concerned, 
he has been mercifully withheld from 
breaking in with too wild a discord. 
The Americano, one notes with satis- 







THE BELLS OF SAN GABRIEL 



Ube Oarben 59 

faction, respects it even in his architec- 
ture, and his best domestic design in 
these parts owes its spirit to the Span- 
iard. The Spanish substratum fur- 
nishes as quaint and picturesque a basis 
for the American superstructure here, 
as it does in St. Augustine, the whole 
width of the continent away. The 
plastered walls, the gables pierced for 
many bells, the plain timbered roof of 
the Mission church, when we presently 
reach it, though not so plain as it 
should be and as it was before a rather 
ill-judged ' ' restoration ' ' — they all 
*' belong" not only to the land, but to 
the original settlement. They all recall 
the days before the Gringo, the days 
celebrated in that classic, ''Two Years 
Before the Mast," in which, in 1830, 
long before the Mexican War, the 
Mormon migration, or the discovery of 



6o Qxxt Mesv 



gold, that "man of Boston raisin' " and 
of Harvard training, Richard Henry 
Dana, celebrated this coast from San 
Diego to San Francisco, when it pro- 
duced nothing but the wild cattle 
whose hides it was his work to store 
and ship, and when he was enough of a 
seer to foresee that if it should ever 
become settled by a more progressive 
race and civilized the Bay of San 
Francisco would be its central seat and 
mart. It is true that, here in San 
Gabriel, it is with some sense of con- 
tradiction and incongruity that one 
finds, just across the street from the 
Mission a modern American shop 
where he may buy most excellent 
modern photographs of the Mission. 
It is still more incongruous to find that 
the ''Padre" who lectures to you about 
the Mission has an unmistakably Mile- 



XTbe Gar5en 6i 



sian face, and an equally Milesian 
brogue, though, to be sure, it is as true 
of the unspoiled Hibernian as of the 
Iberian that there is no vulgarity in 
him. But one is greatly reassured, 
and ''the scent of Old World roses" 
reasserts itself, and ''local color" is 
restored when you encounter on the 
street a swart, sombreroed stranger, 
evidently ignorant of the uses of soap, 
a full-grown citizen who exhibits appre- 
hension and dismay at being accosted 
in the English language, and who 
answers you haltingly, with an evident 
effort of translation. 

The next stage in the Pilgrim's 
Progress for the day is the Santa Anita 
Ranch of Mr. Baldwin, of whom I am 
ashamed to say that I do not know the 
Christian name, since all men call him 
merely "Lucky. " One has seen in his 



62 ®ut Mest 



time his share of "swell" places, in- 
habited by Dukes and the like in their 
seasons, but surely no ''swell place" 
which so bears the stamp of ' ' Liberty, 
Equality, and Fraternity" as this. 
The ''domain," as they say on the 
other side, the ranch, as they say here, 
is of some 40,000 acres, and the owner 
seems to keep it all for the pleasure 
of his fellow-citizens as much as for his 
own. Nothing, apparently, is closed 
to visitors but the actual dwelling, a 
studiously unpretentious bungalow of 
a single story, the exterior of which 
does not excite one's curiosity about 
the interior when there is such an 
enormous deal to be seen outside. 
How much there is to be seen outside! 
It is true that the owner has not yet 
seen his way to running trolley lines 
through his estate. "II ne manquait 



tTbe (Barben 63 



que cela." Tallyho coaches, however, 
under the Jehuship of Hneal descend- 
ants of the driver of Horace Greeley 
across the mountains, and for that 
matter of the son of Nimshi himself, 
bear us furiously, and at times, when 
the road is less level than its wont, 
hair-raisingly through the avenues of 
the domain. Avenues bordered with 
orange trees and lemon trees in full 
leaf and fruitage, with walnut trees, 
with pepper trees, those pendulous and 
picturesque vegetables which not all 
of us have seen before, with their droop- 
ing foliage and their scarlet pods, 
avenues of poplar and of palm, vast 
patches of whatever crops, one is 
tempted to say, will grow for the use of 
man in any clime. And we are shown 
animal as well as vegetable ' ' California 
products," and in equal perfection. 



64 ®ut Mest 



''Bunches " of mules and horned cattle, 
of the best breeds, we have been seeing 
all about the ranch. But here is a 
special stable out of which are solemnly 
led such historical quadrupeds as Em- 
peror of Norfolk, which in his time 
won $200,000 for his lucky owner on the 
Eastern turf, and has since justified 
himself of his "get," and El Rey de 
Santa Anita, of a record only less 
distinguished, cherished now as be- 
comes their past, and not without hope 
for the future in their progeny yet to 
be. One learns with satisfaction that 
the noble owner who employs some 
hundreds of workmen in ''keeping up" 
an estate many times as large as Central 
Park, and as scrupulously kept, and 
who acquired it as a means of spend- 
ing money, is in the way to make 
money out of it by cutting it up for 



Ube (Barben 65 



villa sites for the Easterners who 
have succumbed to the fascinations of 
this fascinating land. 

One of these Easterners occurred at 
the next number on our programme, 
that luncheon at the Hotel Maryland 
which established that besides those 
citrous and pomological products pe- 
culiar, in their degree, to Southern Cali- 
fornia there are to be had there fish 
and flesh and fowl quite equal after 
their kinds to the best productions of 
the East or of the Middle West. It was 
an old friend and co-Centurion who, 
happening to visit the coast last year, 
fell an unresisting victim to its charms, 
took a house in Pasadena on a lease 
running from November to April, and 
now declares that he is not going back 
to New York ''imtil he has to." He 



66 Qnt Mest 



bore me from the banquet hall in his 
fleet automobile to his own cottage, 
through the wonderful avenues of Pasa- 
dena, bordered with live oaks, dodging 
the luxuriant live oak which the layers- 
out of the avenues have had the sense 
to leave standing in the middle of the 
road, past untold hundreds of homes, 
over roads which seem to be asphalted 
but are in fact merely oiled in the 
middle for the diminution of friction 
and the avoidance of dust, to the 
southeastward-opening veranda of the 
Country Club, where the outlook across 
the valley is at its finest, toward the 
*'saw" of the Madre, with its perma- 
nently snow-capped peak of "Old 
Baldy," which has abided in our sub- 
consciousness all the morning. We can 
not only see ' ' Mount Lowe, " the station 
more than half way up, and often above 



XTbe (Barren 67 



the clouds, which is the mountain 
terminus of the Pacific Electric; we 
can also see and distinguish by its white 
scarp on the cliff the still higher 
''Mount Wilson," attainable only on 
foot or mule back, which the Trustees 
of the Carnegie Fund have chosen as 
precisely the most eligible place in the 
United States for the establishment 
of an astronomical observatory, and 
where they have spent two years' 
income of the fund in establishing the 
observatory of which the white side 
gleams to us from the summit, an 
observatory for which even now the 
experimental grinding of a five-foot 
lens beyond the dreams of Alvah Clark 
is in progress. Where on earth is the 
Earthly Paradise, the Happy Valley, 
if not precisely this which lies open to 
the tropical sun between us and that 



6S ©ut Mest 



ridge, dotted with groves green in 
December and with human habita- 
tions ? And the human habitations are 
another trophy of Triumphant Demo- 
cracy, a perfectly American aggre- 
gation. In the mass they make the 
same impression of EquaUty and Fra- 
ternity that they make in detail. 
They are not, none of them is, beyond 
the legitimate aspiration of the frugal 
and industrious American born to no 
birthright but that of his citizenship. 
They are redeemed from vulgarity by 
the genius of the place, perhaps particu- 
larly by the influence of our Spanish 
predecessors, expressed in that Mission 
architecture which is the negation at 
once of luxury and of vulgarity. How 
welcomely unlike they are to that 
absurd and vulgar huddle, on the cliffs 
of Newport, of palaces of which for its 



XTbe (Barren 69 

proper framing and display every one 
needs, not a ''villa plot," but the frame 
and setting of a great park! 

Mr. Cawston's ostrich farm at South 
Pasadena, though in sooth it is rather 
a show room than a farm, the main 
breeding place being back in the 
mountains, and only a hundred and 
fifty birds or so being on view here, 
is one of the sights of the region, wel- 
come for its intrinsic interest and wel- 
come also as a proof that anything 
that will thrive anywhere will thrive 
in this enchanted land. Thrive they 
clearly do, whether they be of the 
black-necked South African or of the 
red-necked Nubian variety, all alike 
rubber-necked, figuratively as well as 
literally, and making test of any new 
object by the infantile process of 



70 Qwt XUaest 



swallowing it or trying to. It is a 
sight to see one of them *' fielding" an 
orange, and to watch the undigested 
globe slipping down the side of his 
absurd neck to tussle with the dissol- 
vent power of his gastric juices. ' ' The 
proper way to take a high ball," mur- 
murs one envious and emulous un- 
feathered biped. The new-fledged 
chicks are as greedy and as indiscrimi- 
nate as their elders. The chicks are 
said to be good to eat, though of 
course they are too valuable as feather 
bearers to be put to that use. The 
adults are not, for Mr. Cawston, the 
enterprising Englishman who has made 
the experiment, relates that an adult 
or two accidentally died on the voyage 
out in a sailing ship, and their bodies 
were given to and rejected by the 
foremast hands. Mr. Cawston's con- 



Ube Garden n 



elusion looks warranted that what a 
sailor will not eat is not edible. An 
ostrich egg, however, should make an 
omelet eligible and sufficient for a 
party, say, of a dozen, estimating 
by the hen's egg that is put along- 
side of it in the photograph to ''give 
scale. ' ' 

And at the ostrich farm my com- 
panions recur, and we whizz in to 
Los Angeles again, the dusk by this 
time setting in, to prepare for the 
press banquet; but we return hope- 
lessly smitten, like everybody else, 
with the charms of this land, and 
with a fixed determination, also like 
everybody else, to come back and 
end our days on this enchanted 
shore. 



72 ®ut Mest 



Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bliih'n? 
Im dunklen Laub die Goldorangen gliih'n, 
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht, 
Die Myrthe still, und hoch die Lorbeer steht. 
Kennst du es wo hi! Dahin, dahin, 
Mocht ich mit dir, O meine Liebe, ziehn. 



Day Fifth 
UP THE COAST 

A ''banquet" of which the hall is 
not deserted until after midnight is 
not the best preparation for beginning 
to see scenery at 8 a.m., which was the 
inexorable hour at which, after making 
my packets, my train was to bear me 
forth of the City of the Angels and up 
the coast to San Francisco. Forbye 
that when one has been rocked for 
four nights by Alma Pullman, he 
misses her lullaby and does not sleep 
very well in a bed. When the pas- 
senger on the Coast Line really 
awakens to a sense of his surroundings, 
he is passing through a country much 
like the garden of yesterday, ''lands of 

73 



74 ®ut West 



palm, of orange blossom, of olive, aloe, 
and maize and vine," past stations of 
the queerly mixed Spanish and Gringo 
nomenclature. Oxnard, of anti -Cuban 
reciprocity memory, for example, is 
sandwiched in between Hueneme and 
Montalvo. It is 10.19 of December 
morning by he time-table when you 
learn, by the capital map the Southern 
Pacific provides for the earnest seeker, 
that you are approaching San Buena 
Ventura. You have just time to bluff 
a translation as ''Holy Good Luck" 
when the translation justifies itself. 
''Thalatta, Thalatta; by Jove, I saw 
the sea," as Kinglake has it in that 
famous burst in ''Eothen." Like 
stout Balboa, and only a trifling matter 
of some 392 years behind him, I, too, 
''stared at the Pacific." For the en- 
suing six hours of daylight that jour- 



xap the Coast 75 

ney was a delightful dream. One is 
prone, ungratefully, to exclaim, the best 
of all these days of which each is the 
best. Blue is the Pacific, the greatest 
expanse upon this planet of ours, with 
a blueness quite unknown to the so- 
journers by the misty coast of the sad 
North Atlantic, and beautiful with a 
beauty as far beyond. Nobody that 
I know has done justice to it by pen 
or even by brush, though the latter is 
the more eligible utensil. You would 
know at once, and quite apart from 
the solecism of going North with the 
ocean on your left hand, that this 
summer sea was not the Atlantic you 
had left, where the line of division 
between sea and sky is always a some- 
what misty zone, whereas here, as on 
the great lakes, the rim of the horizon 
is starkly clear. There is no ''melan- 



76 ©ut Mest 



choly wash of endless waves" about 
this sunHt sparkle of sapphire and 
silver. You remember Stevenson's 
''On the Beach at Monterey," Mon- 
terey of which we are presently to pass 
far to the inland. The lines are among 
the most nearly successful of his es- 
says in verse, but they read as if he 
had never seen the Pacific: 

Now that you have spelt your lesson, lay it 

down and go and play, 
Seeking shells and seaweed on the sands of 

Monterey ; 
Watching all the mighty whalebones, lying 

buried by the breeze, 
Tiny sandpipers and the huge Pacific seas. 

What have the ''huge Pacific seas" 
to do with this coast, where even in 
late December the "sunny waters" 
"only heave with a summer swell"? 
Clarence King's prose, in "Mountain- 



xap tbe Coast 77 

eering in the Sierra Nevada," is much 
more to the point : 

The western margin of this continent is 
built of a series of mountain chains folded in 
broad corrugations, like waves of stone upon 
whose seaward base beat the mild, small 
breakers of the Pacific. 

All the same, I wish Stevenson had 
my present task of trying to convey 
in prose some sense of the charm of 
this loveliest of all the coasts of all the 
seas. How beautifully he would do 
it! And how beautifully it ought to 
be done! There has been much good 
verse written about the coast of Italy 
which the passenger along this coast 
finds himself mentally transferring to 
it, as mile after mile of tranquil and 
varied and not insipid beauty passes 
him in review during the five hours of 
daylight, for the 150 miles of space 



78 ©ut Mest 



that intervene between the ''Holy 
Good Luck" which brings him upon 
the coast and the San Luis Obispo, 
where he leaves it to deviate in- 
land and upland. Buchanan Read's 
''Drifting" and Tennyson's "Daisy" 
recur to him mile by mile as poetry 
which this panorama must have in- 
spired. From the latter I have 
already quoted, but I must quote 
again, so redolent is it of this atmo- 
sphere and so reflective of this land- 
scape : 

Distant color, happy hamlet, 
A moldered citadel on' the coast, 

Or tower, or high hill convent, seen 
A light amid its olives green ; 

Or olive -hoary cape in ocean 
Or rosy blossom in hot ravine. 

Here is a station, called, inevitably, 
for a namer who had a sense of the fit- 



TDlp tbe Coast 79 

ness of things, "Surf," where some 
lucky conformation of the bottom 
causes the white horses to shake their 
manes far out at sea, and to roll in in 
successions of white, yeasty foam, with 
such an effect of contrast between 
them and the blue beyond and between 
as surely one has never seen elsewhere 
or before. Here is a green promontory 
jutting out into the blue, just large 
enough to hold the little fruitful 
garden patch, the little white-washed 
cottage, and the white shaft of the 
pharos of the happy and enviable 
lighthouse keeper. Here is a blue inlet 
which, cutting far into the mainland, 
vividly brings back the ''Last Valley" 
at Newport, whether in its actual as- 
pect or in Mr. La Farge's reproduction 
of its effect. In truth, the impression 
of this coast is that of Newport, of a 



8o Qnt Mest 



hundred miles of a magnified but not 
distorted Newport, the only stretch of 
the Atlantic seaboard which can for a 
moment be compared with it. The 
impression is the same impression of 
suavity and ''elegance " and gracious- 
ness. There is nothing forbidding 
about these rounded hills ; contrariwise 
something neighborly and sociable and 
inviting. One might still liken them, 
as I likened those terrible lands of 
Wyoming, to elephants, but now to re- 
cumbent green elephants, facing you; 
rounded, even ''quilted" elephants, fac- 
ing you, aligned in order, "elephants 
a-grazing," and stretching out their 
proboscides downward to the train and 
the shore as if in quest of the votive 
peanut, the illusion being assisted by the 
casual cow or sheep, grazing in a nostril 
or an eye, and in scale with the flea 



'dp tbe Coast 8i 

which would be Hkely to infest the actual 
animal. Truly, if I had been brought 
out blindfold from New York, and had 
seen nothing but this five hours' pano- 
rama of "The Coast," I should think 
my journey well repaid. They already 
call Southern California "the Italy of 
America." When they come to call- 
ing Italy the Southern California of 
Europe, the claims of poetical and 
pictorial justice will be nearer their 
satisfaction. General Chaffee has just 
endeared himself anew, as I read in 
this day's papers, to the coast, to 
which he was endeared before, as to all 
other parts of his country, by declining 
Mayor McClellan's offer of an office, 
upon the ground that he was going 
back to "good old California." Good 
old General! 

A neighbor on the train, with whom 



82 ®ut Mest 



I fall into talk, sheds light on several 
things. He is a typical Coaster, born 
''back East," came out here as a 
trooper in the Fourth Cavalry, hap- 
pened to be here when he was dis- 
charged, thirty-five years ago, settled, 
has been dabbling since in ' ' mining and 
stock raising," and now, at the fifty- 
five years which naturally accrue to 
him after that experience, evidently, 
though not at all ostentatiously, finds 
himself, as the French locution is, "at 
his ease." This country, he tells me, 
meaning Southern California, and 
being himself a San Franciscan, is a 
good place to wind up in. That is 
what it is for. But it is no place to 
begin at any more. These Swedes who 
come out here to get a homestead, and 
find that land is $200 an acre, and that 
they can't buy less than a thousand 



IHp tbe Coast s^ 

acres — well, they go somewhere else. 
And to my inquiry whether perpetual 
summer was not enervating of the 
human energies, he makes thought- 
ful answer: ''Oh, yes. They do get 
damn lazy." 

We turn inland at last, after this 
vision of beauty beyond our imagina- 
tion, but only to exchange it for 
another beauty and another interest. 
In the first fourteen miles after leaving 
San Luis Obispo we climb 1,400 feet, 
and, as it looks to me, box the com- 
pass three or four times. My friend 
"Louis," the train boy, whom all the 
habitual passengers know by that 
name and whom I know by no other, 
the only "train boy" I have ever en- 
countered who was not a public nui- 
sance, whereas he is one of the most 



84 ©Ut WiCBt 



enlightening and agreeable of ciceroni, 
with whom it is a privilege to travel — 
my friend Louis, who, during this de- 
lightful day, has sold me sundry dol- 
lars' worth of literature and art which 
I really needed, but which I should 
assuredly have flung back if presented 
to me by the usual train boy — my 
friend Louis, I repeat, to whom, if 
these lines should meet his eye, I 
desire to confess my personal obliga- 
tions and to call the attention of the 
authorities of the Southern Pacific 
Railroad to his merits, is kind enough, 
at this juncture, to come aft and point 
out to me the old stage trail, winding 
and zigzagging in general conformity 
with the course of our train, within our 
windings and commonly below them. 
I am in "Bret Harte's country." Not 
literally, for he ''operated" mainly in 



'dp tbe (Toast 85 

the Sacramento Valley, beyond San 
Francisco, or on the other side of the 
range. But the old stage route brings 
us near akin. And Louis tells me a 
tale of the days when the stage route 
was already obsolescent, tells it in 
view of the oak tree which was the 
hero of the tale. ''Yuba Dam," says 
Louis, or possibly Profane Bill, ''was 
drivin' a party of school-moms through 
here on an excursion. Just here, one 
of 'em says, ' Mr. Dam, didn't you use 
to be robbed hereabouts in old times ? ' 
'Betcherlife,' says Yuba, 'and not such 
old times, neither. Three months ago 
I was held up . ' ' My ! Where did they 
waylay you?' 'Mostly by that big 
tree right there — and there is the 
galoot now.' And," concludes Louis, 
"and he was." After that I can no 
more regard myself as a tenderfoot 



86 ®ut Mest 



than the maiden lady in Stevenson's 
tale could regard herself as a maiden 
lady after she had heard the Commis- 
sary of Police swearing at night out of 
his window. Dear reader and possible 
follower, whatever happens, do not let 
anybody persuade you to go from Los 
Angeles to San Francisco either by the 
Valley Route or by a nefarious "Owl 
Train" which runs through all this 
splendor in the darkness. 

Too much beauty, taken in too big 
gulps, is as cloying as any other surfeit. 
Wherefore the amateur of his own sensa- 
tions is relieved to find that the Decem- 
ber day is no longer, and that the dark 
is settling, though he must pause to note 
with pleasure, that one of the undistin- 
guished stations we have passed is, by 
the piety of the California he celebrated. 



IHV tbe Coast 87 

named ''Nordhoff," after that high- 
minded and patriotic man who had 
praised his CaUfornians, as who could 
fail to do who knew them, and who, an 
old man, broken with the storms of 
journalism, came here to lay his weary 
bones among them. But it is a distinct 
relief that the darkness closes in before 
we can see the Santa Clara, ' * the richest 
valley in California," which we are 
condoled with upon missing. Heaven 
knows we are not, since yesterday, 
' ' short ' ' of rich valleys. ' ' Utter dark- 
ness" does us a favor in ''closing her 
wing ' ' so timely that there is not, from 
here to San Francisco, anything we are 
obliged to admire. These condolences 
are misplaced. 

Surely, after the strenuous hospi- 
tality of Los Angeles all day yesterday 



88 ®ut West 



and most of last night, one has nothing 
to ask of the Palace Hotel in San Fran- 
cisco but a place to sleep when he 
drives to it at 10.30 p.m. They tell 
me, by the way, that I should not 
have come here, but to the Saint 
Francis, which, just now, while the 
opening of the Fairmount, which is to 
be the tiptop of Franciscan hotel keep- 
ing, is still in abeyance, is the only cor- 
rect thing. But, San Buena Ventura! 
What should I have missed if I had 
gone an3rwhere else? The uncove- 
nanted mercy of the assemblage of the 
beauty and fashion of San Francisco 
at the Palace Hotel at some social 
function of the name and nature of 
which I am gladly ignorant, but which 
enabled me to watch for an hour the 
San Franciscan procession of women 
through the corridors of this ' ' battered 



XDlp tbe Coast 89 



caravanserai," how can one be thank- 
ful enough for that ? To be sure, they 
wore their wraps, though that scarcely 
mattered. There was a screen erected 
between the great court of the hotel 
and the ballroom at the rear, which 
screen concealed the dancers, but did 
not conceal the '^ floral decorations." 
The floral decorations were a wealth of 
tropical bloom which would have cost 
a king's ransom in New York, if they 
could have been had there at all, which 
at this season they could not. But 
what I looked at, and what I still recall, 
is that procession of the women of San 
Francisco. Some fifteen years ago Mr. 
Kipling recorded his belief that San 
Francisco was ''inhabited by a per- 
fectly insane people, whose women 
are of a remarkable beauty." To the 
latter branch of the proposition nobody 



90 ®ut mest 



with my opportunities for observa- 
tion could possibly prevent himself from 
subscribing. For an hour or so that 
procession defiled by me. There was 
scarcely one female processionist, from 
eighteen to sixty, who was "plain" or 
commonplace. The rank and file were 
tributes more cogent than a ''mon- 
strous turnip or giant pine" to the 
influence of the soil and the climate, 
"California products" about which 
there is no disputing, "magnificent 
specimens." Dear sisters of our own 
Four Hundred, as one sees your round- 
ups in the glittering horseshoe's ample 
round of the Metropolitan Opera House, 
on the East Drive of Central Park, in 
the ballroom which the elderly philoso- 
pher may occasionally be inveigled 
into visiting, at the Horse Show, which 
not so long ago was known as a Beauty 



tip the Coast 91 

Show, let nobody delude you into 
opening this latter to bipedal as well as 
quadrupedal continental competition. 
Painful as the confession may be to a 
Manhattanese, you will not be in it 
with these ' ' California products. ' ' You 
will be, I will not say outdressed, but 
''outlooked" and even ''out styled." 
At the end of this day of superla- 
tive natural beauty, it is neverthe- 
less a patriotic privilege to come upon 
this assemblage of human beauty, 
and to remember gratefully Mr. 
Myers's heartfelt British tribute to 
the American woman whom we have 
been seeing in her most impressive 
avatar : 

Spread then, Great Land, thine arms afar, 
Thy golden harvests westward roll ; 

Banner with banner, star with star, 
Ally the tropics and the pole ; 



92 Qnt Mest 



There glows no gem than these more bright 
From ice to fire, from sea to sea; 

Blossoms no fairer flower to light 
Through all thine endless empery. 



Day Sixth 
THE GOLDEN GATE* 

Here we are at last at the Golden 
Gate, ' ' at the land's end and the world's 
end and the end of the Aryan migra- 
tion," as is set forth in "The Helmet 
of Mambrino." At the one angle of a 
triangle of which the other two are the 
City of the Angels and the City of the 
Saints, nobody has pretended to find in 
San Francisco much affinity with either. 
It is, on the contrary, frankly mundane, 
"wide open" with a width of openness 
beyond the dreams of Tammany, and 

* Written, the reader will observe, some months 
before the awful calamity which destroyed the city 
it describes. But it seems best to let it stand as 
written, as a traveler's impression of the San Fran- 
cisco that was. 

93 



94 Qxxt 'meet 



boasts itself, and one judges with 
reason, to be the most cosmopohtan of 
all the towns of a country which is itself 
a cosmos in attracting strangers from 
all lands. In the seven hours or so of 
December daylight which are left one 
between a late and leisurely breakfast 
and the dark, nay, between that meal 
and the departure of his train, one has 
no time for Oakland or Berkeley, not 
even for the Cliff House and the 
Golden Gate Park, which are the boasts 
of San Francisco itself. It is open to 
him only, in the language of the 
Psalmist, to ''grin like a dog and run 
about the city." The provision for 
running about the city is not so ample 
as one finds in the Middle West, or 
even in the effete East, being the obso- 
lescent cable car mainly, and even one 
sees the elsewhere-for-that-purpose ob- 



Ube Golden Gate 95 

solete horse still employed as an instru- 
ment of public traction. There has 
been a "seeing San Francisco" auto- 
mobile service, but I learn that it has 
languished and been abandoned; and 
there is another, just starting, which 
boasts itself to have ' ' the largest auto- 
mobile on the Coast, seating twenty 
persons," half as man}^ as one can see 
any day swarming on one of the obser- 
vation automobiles in Broadway, and 
drinking in the megaphonous eloquence 
of the barker. But I happened to fall 
between these two stools, and, the 
private automobile at $5 per hour 
being rather too rich for my blood, I 
fulfilled for the most part literally the 
Psalmist's description, and did not 
regret it, dividing my few hours be- 
tween the "business center" and the 
"swell" residential quarter, and find- 



96 ©Ut WiC&t 



ing in each reason to regret the brevity 
of my sojourn. 

San Francisco has been much written 
about, and by great writers. Bret 
Harte, Stevenson, and KipUng are 
compeUing names. And yet I find 
that I have derived from reading no 
real notion of the place. 

The flimsy architecture of a mining 
camp survives in great quantities to 
disturb the impression of a modern 
city, and even to endanger more per- 
manent and more valuable erections. 
The early magnates of ''Nob Hill " had 
the crudity of their own architectural 
tastes reinforced by the general belief 
that frame buildings were the most 
trustworthy against earthquakes, and 
they put up balloon frames and went 
to wild excesses in jig-sawyery by way 



XTbe Golben Gate 97 



of spending money. There is much 
crudity left even in the commercial 
center, though there, and there alone, 
there does not seem to be left any 
dangerous combustibility. The mon- 
strous Palace Hotel, a monument, I 
suppose, of the early seventies, is highly 
characteristic, with its seven-story 
court, which the architect probably 
called a "patio," surrounded by balco- 
nies, and these in turn with bedrooms, 
of which it is a detail in the general 
splendiferousness that they are dark 
cells, in which you cannot even see 
your way about without artificial light. 

The same architectural anarchy that 
characterizes the building of other 
American cities signalizes that of San 
Francisco, and yet more abundantly. 
Individualism is more rampant and 



98 ®Ut WiC5t 



civism more discouraged than in New- 
York or Chicago. The architectural 
lions of the place, apart from the 
admirable Ferry Station, which a repro- 
duction of the Giralda of Seville crowns 
as it crowns the Madison Square 
Garden, and even more effectively by 
dint of the greater effectiveness of its 
isolated and conspicuous site — the 
''lions" are the three newspaper build- 
ings, of which two are officially known 
by other names than those of the news- 
papers, but all popularly by their news- 
paper names. Each of them has its 
interest, but none of them has any- 
thing architecturally to do with either 
of the others. Intrinsically the Hearst 
Building is not only the most interest- 
ing and attractive of them, but also it 
affords by its graceful and skillful recall 
of the architecture of the original Span- 



Ubc (3ol^en Gate 99 

ish settlement the most eligible point of 
departure for the commercial architec- 
ture of San Francisco, when it shall 
cease to be chaotic. The Crocker Build- 
ing is a favorable example of the con- 
ventional treatment of the skyscraper, 
in which it is still represented as a build- 
ing of masonry instead of a frame build- 
ing, and the actual masonry of the great 
commercial concerns is exemplary for 
its straightforward rationality of design. 

Besides its wooden fiimsiness the up- 
and-downness of San Francisco is the 
feature for which I was not fully pre- 
pared. This unevenness has queer con- 
sequences. For example, the ''swell" 
quarter — Jackson Street and Pacific 
Avenue far up the hill and their connect- 
ing streets — crowned, really with an 
Acropolitan effectiveness, by the ranged 

LOFC 



loo ©lit Mest 



stories and wings of the still incomplete 
' ' Fairmount " — this swell quarter 
takes its rise from ''Chinatown," and 
the hill it sits on stands knee-deep in 
that undesirable and despised purlieu, 
which offers the only access. When 
you get out there, and have ceased 
wondering at the jig-saw antics of the 
days of the old ' ' magnates, " ' ' when the 
miners were the kings," you find as 
interesting a residential quarter, of as 
beautiful houses without and — if I may 
generalize from the gracious hospitality 
of the only one it was vouchsafed me to 
enter — within, as you will find in any 
American or foreign city, and with the 
same grateful air that the houses of 
Pasadena had of not being ''palaces," 
but only happy and comfortable homes, 
trophies, once more, of "Triumphant 
Democracy." 



Day Seventh 
OVER THE RANGE 

There is nothing to see from the 
Oakland ferryboat at 6 o'clock p.m. 
in late December excepting the reced- 
ing twinkles of the lights of Cosmopolis 
and the ferryboat itself, which, by dint 
of taking forty minutes to its transit, is 
a floating barber's shop and restaurant 
as well as conveyance. The Sacra- 
mento Valley and its stations are like- 
wise mere names called out in the dark. 
But this morning, Holy Good Luck 
once more! For I awake precisely at 
the psychological moment and twitch 
my curtain blue to become aware, in 
the gray dawning, of snow and pine 
trees outside, and to raise the curtain 



I02 ®ut mc5t 



entirely on the new scene. The sky 
brightens from gray to luminous pale 
amber, not bright enough yet to extin- 
guish a pale fading star or two, the 
dark green of the pines grows starker, 
and the great carpet whiter. We have 
passed the summit and are unmistak- 
ably sliding down hill. The sudden 
consciousness that this is sunrise on the 
Sierra Nevada we are witnessing dis- 
sipates the last remains of drowsiness. 
And presently we whisk into the dark 
of a tunnel, with rapid slits of light in 
its timber frame, and no sooner out of 
that than we plunge into another. A 
line of Kipling has been running in my 
head all these days, the line that tells 
how "the many-shedded levels loop 
and twine," and I have been awaiting 
the verification. The snowsheds of 
the plains have been long since aban- 



®ver tbe IRange 103 

doned in favor of the wind breaks and 
snow breaks of Wyoming I have al- 
ready told of. The verification is com- 
plete at last. The whole stanza is 
worth quoting for the vividness with 
which it paints this scene : 

Through the gorge that gives the stars at 
noonday clear — 
Up the pass that packs the scud beneath 
our wheel — 
Round the bluff that sinks her thousand 
fathom sheer — 
Down the valley with our guttering brakes 
asqueal : 

Where the trestle groans and quivers in the 
snow, 
Where the many-shedded levels loop and 
twine, 
So I lead my reckless children from below 

Till we sing the song of Roland to the pine. 
With my " Tinka-tinka-tinka-tink ! " 

(And the ax has cleared the mountain, 
croup and crest.) 
So we ride the iron stallions down to drink, 
Through the canyons to the waters of the 
West. 



I04 ®ut Mest 



There is the crossing of the Sierra 
done once and for all. ''Hurrah!" 
I remember Clarence King exclaim- 
mg in his joy when he fell in with that 
stanza for the first time, Clarence 
King, the best of all judges by his 
knowledge of the range which he 
crossed and explored years before the 
railroad, and by his poetical sensibility 
also — and ever after maintained that 
''The Song of the Banjo " was Kipling's 
high-water mark in verse. 

It is a different world on the hither 
side of the mountains, with its somber 
pine forest, its scarps and gulches, its 
increasing signs everywhere of dis- 
figuring mining, quarrying, boring in- 
dustries, its Yankeeism for the Spanish 
of the further slope, the sweet do noth- 
ing supplanted by the ugly do much. 



Qvcv tbe IRange 



The change is denoted by the disappear- 
ance of the sonorous Spanish names of 
the stations of the coast Hne, even the 
Benicia and Sacramento of the western 
slope displaced by Colfax and Gold 
Run and Dutch Flat and Truckee. 
For all that, the scene is full of interest 
until we reach the bottom, the high 
plateau of Nevada. But after five 
miles of this, with its monotonous sage 
brush bounded by low-lying mountains 
afar off, one finds, absolutely for the 
first time since leaving Omaha, that he 
can afford to betake himself to a book 
by daylight, and is not compelled to 
keep looking out of the window for 
fear of losing something. 

Almost the only incident I recall of 
this daylong journey over the arid 
plain is that of the accursed newsboy 



io6 ©Ut WiCBt 



of Reno, whom, being pressed for time, 
I engaged to buy me a quarter's 
worth of souvenir postcards at the 
neighboring store, and who returned 
with four, the souvenir card through- 
out the West being a staple article at 
two for a nickel or twelve for a quarter. 
A nimble and promising thief that 
newsboy, whether destined for the 
Senate or the halter. Rather sadly fell 
our Christmas Eve, in spite of the cheer- 
fulness and the abundant and strange 
ancedotage of the genial 'Friscan friend 
I picked up. The dullness was light- 
ened an hour after dark by the irrup- 
tion into the smoking apartment of the 
Pullman we two had had mainly to 
ourselves, of a lank stripling in a red 
flannel shirt and cowhide boots, appar- 
ently a cowboy fresh from riding the 
range, who produced from his stores a 



©per tbe IRanoe 107 

box of better cigars than you would 
expect to encounter in Nevada. ' ' Very 
likely some magnate's son," whispers 
my 'Friscan friend. ''You can't go 
by clothes here." Sure enough, it 
appears casually that the newcomer 
is a graduate of Leland Stanford, who 
knows many things besides sheep rais- 
ing, which he evidently knows particu- 
larly, and tells us that there are a mil- 
lion sheep in Nevada. How they pick 
up a living is more than one can make 
out from what is to be seen from the 
railroad's right of way, which still com- 
mands a broad prospect. 



Day Eighth 
THE CITY OF THE SAINTS 

And once again, ''San Buena Ven- 
tura"! As yesterday, I am awakened 
just at the psychological moment, 
awakened, this time, by a feeling that 
the chugging beneath the car is not 
the smooth, continuous glide to which 
by this time I am inured, a feeling of a 
different substructure. A twitch of 
the curtain assures me that the sur- 
rounding country is not snow, as yes- 
terday, or sand, as four days ago, nor 
any variety of terra firma, but ripples 
of water. We are on a bridge. The 
complete arousal which follows this 
discovery brings with it a sense that we 
must be at last on the great ''Lucin 

io8 



XLhc Ctt^ ot tbe Saints 109 

Cut-off, ' ' which modern railroading 
has erected on trestles across the shal- 
lower parts of the Great Salt Lake, to 
save certain forty-odd miles of distance, 
certain difficult grades, certain racking 
curves. ''I am not here" to give you 
the statistics of these economies. Mr. 
Oscar K. Davis has given them com- 
pletely in the January Century, to 
which I beg to refer importunate in- 
quirers. From his most interesting 
and exhaustive article you will learn 
how it pays a great railroad to grapple 
with bristling engineering problems, 
and to expend a bagatelle of four mil- 
lions or so in such an improvement in 
order to reduce operating expenses of 
which each singly and daily is a trifle, 
but of which the accumulation, in 
time and space, is enormous. Mr. 
Davis's summary is worth repeating: 



no ©ut Wiest 



''Forty-three miles in distance are 
lopped off, heart breaking grades 
avoided, curves eliminated, hours of 
time in transit saved, and untold 
worry and vexation prevented, at the 
same time that expenses of operation 
are reduced more than enough to pay 
interest on the whole cost twice over." 
When you have taken in the figures 
you will be in the way of realizing that 
even the vast design of tunneling the 
Sierra Nevada and doing away with 
our sunrise of yesterday is not an iri- 
descent dream of the designer, but an 
urgent problem of practical railroading. 

Meanwhile the picturesque tourist 
who is here to receive with thankful- 
ness what impressions may befall him 
cannot be too thankful for the good 
luck which no contract could have 



Ubc Citp ot tbe Saints m 

guaranteed him. He finds himself, 
so far as sensations and perceptions go, 
from this side of the car or from the 
other, on a railroad out in the middle 
of the ocean: 

nee jam amplius ullae 
Apparent terrae, coelum undique et undique 
pontus. 

Nothing in the gray dawn visible but 
sea and sky, as is no wonder with the 
greatest, excepting the Great Lakes, 
of all our inland waters. But now, off 
to the southeast, if indeed we head due 
eastward, the gray murk, low down on 
the horizon, becomes faintly em- 
purpled, while above it the still unrisen 
sun inflames two broad horizontal belts 
of cloud to gold, heightens the pallid 
sky above them to palpitating green, 
and, still above, kindles to flaming 



112 (S)ut limest 



scarlet a great fleece of morning mist. 
We see great sunsets from the Times 
tower. (I do not know so much about 
the sunrises from that point of view.) 
At Salt Lake, as I am presently to hear, 
they pride themselves on both sunrises 
and sunsets, holding, it seems, that the 
saline particles rising from a lake some 
ten times as salt as the Atlantic refract 
to peculiar beauty the level solar rays. 
However that may be, this Christmas 
sunrise over the lake is a picture to 
hang with the sunrise of yesterday 
over the Sierra in the gallery of memory 
so long as memory lasts. 

It is rather startling, in alighting at 
the City of the Saints, to find the first 
building after leaving the station and 
the rather shabby hotel which con- 
fronts it, emblazoned in large gilt 



Ubc dttp of tbe Saints us 

letters "Keeley Institute." One can- 
not say the institute is superfluous, for, 
even on Christmas Day, one finds pro- 
vision for both the bibulous and the 
aleatory instincts of our nature appar- 
ently adequate to any possible demand. 
"There," explained my most kindly 
local guide, philosopher, and friend, 
''in that saloon," indicating one of no 
exceptional exterior splendor, ' ' you will 
meet every millionaire in Utah, if you 
wait long enough. Some of 'em won't 
drink an3rwhere else." As to the alea- 
toriness, I was to witness that it is the 
custom of the leading citizens of Salt 
Lake to toy with contrivances of cards 
or dice, in competition with the dealer, 
to determine whether, when they 
wanted two cigars, they should pay 
for four or for none. As for ''Mining 
Stocks for Sale" in the window of a 



114 ©Ut WiCSt 



saloon, I had been familiarized with 
that phenomenon in Ogden. The 
sanctimony of the Latter Day Saints 
looks peculiar. 

Through this rapid record I have 
confined myself to impressions and 
forborne to go into ''questions." But, 
here in Salt Lake City, the Mormon 
question is of the essence. It is in the 
air. I asked my aforementioned local 
authority whether the line of political 
cleavage was a line also of social 
demarkation, whether, for instance, a 
Mormon was "clubbable" from the 
Gentile point of view. ''Bless your 
innocence!" was his answer, "half the 
friends I shall introduce you to, walk- 
ing up the street, will probably be 
Mormons." Another Gentile said: 
' ' Politically we are down on them, and 



Tlbc Cit^ of tbe Saints 115 

will beat them every time we can. 
They owe a higher allegiance than that 
to Uncle Sam, and we won't have it. 
But socially they are just like anybody 
else. We dance with the girls and 
drink with the men." The Gentiles 
have, in fact, won a great municipal 
victory just now here in Salt Lake. 
It is hard for the stranger to make out 
how a people so peculiar should not be 
more peculiar. 

''Temple Square" is the only archi- 
tectural peculiarity of the place, for 
the monument to ''Brigham Young 
and the Pioneers," though one might 
wish it were a better monument, is by 
the testimony of candid Gentiles de- 
served, and the Eagle Gate has its 
ample excuses, from the point of view 
of its projectors. There would be a 



ii6 ®ut Mest 



better Pioneers' Monument now, not 
that this is a bad one as American 
monuments go. Mr. Dalhn, the Mor- 
mon sculptor, of whose work a spirited 
equestrian sketch stands in the pleasant 
and hospitable Commercial Club, is of 
high repute with his artistic brethren; 
and in the same repository I found 
several canvases by a painter who evi- 
dently knew his Paris, and whose work 
was not more redolent of his native soil 
than that of the other usual graduates 
of that capital. The notion of an artis- 
tic Mormon is startling to the stranger. 
Yet in fact there is more artistic apti- 
tude among the Mormons than among 
their Gentile neighbors, and they take 
to music, as well as to the plastic arts, 
with readiness and success. It is plea- 
sure and justice to record that those 
Gentiles who do not inhabit Utah, 



tlbe Cit^ of tbe Saints n? 

and who have only business dealings 
with the Mormon leaders, have nothing 
but good to say of them as men of ideas, 
as men of affairs, and as fair dealers. 

Do you remember Dickens's testi- 
mony about the shipload of English 
Mormon emigrants he went to look at 
in the London Docks in the early six- 
ties, prepared to curse, and found him- 
self compelled to bless altogether? It 
is worth quoting how, watching them 
under the circumstances of a hasty 
embarkation in a sailing ship, he would 
have taken them for ''in their degree, 
the pick and flower of England. ' ' 

"To suppose the family groups of 
whom the majority of emigrants were 
composed polygamically possessed, 
would be to suppose an absurdity 
manifest to any one who saw the 
fathers and mothers. ... I went on 



ii8 ©ut Mest 



board their ship to bear testimony 
against them if they deserved it, as I 
fully believed they would ; to my great 
astonishment they did not deserve it; 
and my predispositions must not affect 
me as an honest witness." 

A survey of Salt Lake from Temple 
Square to Fort Douglas and back — 
Fort Douglas, which has been an over- 
hanging menace to the town almost 
since the expedition of Albert Sidney 
Johnston, in the days of Buchanan — 
shows only a very attractive and invit- 
ing town, with wide expanse of happy 
homes, its due proportion of churches 
— Catholic, Congregational, and so 
forth — with more than its due pro- 
portion, one would say, of schoolhouses. 
Looking at the stately schoolhouses 
and the Temple one is inclined to 



Ubc Ctt^ ot tbe Saints 119 

repeat with Victor Hugo about the 
printed book and Notre Dame, ''ceci 
tuera cela." But apparently not so. 
The learning of the Gentiles is avail- 
able to the Saints. If there be a 
Gentile University of Utah, so also 
there is a University of the Saints and a 
''Brigham Young University" thereto. 
If there be an able and pugnacious 
Salt Lake Tribune, so there is an able 
and pugnacious Mormon organ. The 
Deseret News, of which I obtained a 
holiday number, weighing a pound and 
a half and including a hundred pages, 
according to the canons of ''metro- 
politan" Sunday journalism, and of 
which I should not speak ill, for it had 
much information of use to me. But 
one cannot help feeling that Mormon- 
ism is doomed, in spite of all the 
specious showings it can make for itself. 



:2o ©ut Mest 



A peculiar people can remain peculiar 
only by detachment and isolation, and 
must merge now that it has been fairly 
caught up with. It is a lack of faith 
in "Uncle Sam" to seek to accelerate 
the inevitable catastrophe. A nation 
which boasts of being able to assimi- 
late so many hundreds of thousands of 
polyglot foreigners a year would show 
little confidence in itself if it did not 
believe that it could assimilate these 
few hundreds of thousands of belated 
strangers without exterminating or per- 
secuting them, and should trust to 
violence rather than to time, which 
works more surely: 



Even as that Bull-god once did stand 
And watched the burial-clouds of sand, 
Till these at last, without a hand, 
Rose o'er his eyes, another land, 
And blinded him with Destiny. 



BACK EAST" 



izi 



"BACK EAST" 

And so I rejoin in the Christmas 

dusk my companions of the first trip of 

the Los Angeles Limited, having for 

the first time seen my country, and 

being now engaged in the attempt to 

celebrate it. I do not know how much 

the eagle may have been heard to 

screech in the foregoing pages. I only 

know that patriotic pride and joy have 

attended the voyager and increased 

with every step of his progress. It is a 

dozen years or more since an eminent 

editor explaining his ''run across," 

said: ''Oh, you know, Europe is a 

matter now of $200 and ten days." 

True, the voyager for that money and 

in that time can cross and, on an 

express steamer, even recross, having 
123 



124 :fl5acft iSast 

observed the scenery of the North 
Atlantic by the way. It is exactly ten 
days from Chicago to Chicago, this trip 
we have been taking, twelve days from 
New York to New York, eight days 
from the Missouri to the Coast and back, 
as we have gone and come. ''Ten 
days and $200" from Chicago, twelve 
days and $250, say, from New York. 
Our trip was possibly too strenuous for 
some, who would require more than 
three nights out of twelve in a station- 
ary bed. Allowances can be made by 
and for these weaker brethren and 
sisters. I should have been glad of 
another day in the Garden, and of 
another at the Golden Gate, which 
would have made an even fortnight 
from New York. But in what direc- 
tion could you go, within these limits 
of time and money, which would offer 



IBacft Bast 125 



so much of delight to the eyes, of 
instruction to the mind, of ahment for 
patriotism ? For this last in the retro- 
spect is the most potent of considera- 
tions. It used to be the fashion for 
politicians returning from Europe to 
say that they came back better Ameri- 
cans than they went. But an Ameri- 
can, whatever part he inhabits, cannot 
help coming back from travel in the 
other parts a better American than he 
went. Even poor old New York may 
have its patriotic uses for a Middle 
Westerner himself. To see three thou- 
sand miles of Triumphant Democracy, 
to mingle with all sorts and condi- 
tions of men and not to find one who 
does not fervently believe in the United 
States of America — that is an experi- 
ence which must be undergone to 
be appreciated. After all our ''little 



126 Bacft Bast 



fears," Liberty, Equality, Fraternity 
are accomplished facts throughout this 
land. ''I met a hundred men on the 
road to Delhi, and they were all my 
brothers." 







~^ W^ 


Ll, V J^^r V 


:'t 


1 




1 



"CONSIDERATIONS BY THE 
WAY." 



127 



"CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY" 

" The side lights of a car in motion," 
according to Rufus Choate, whose the 
phrase is, hardly afford a safe basis for 
generalization. And yet the observer 
who is fresh from surveying three 
thousand miles of Triumphant Democ- 
racy cannot help compiling his obser- 
vations into some sort of general 
conclusions. The mere necessity of 
arranging them in order compels him to 
so much of generalization. He cannot 
help asking himself, "What does all 
this mean?" After painful ponder- 
ing, it seems to this voyager and ob- 
server that the most convenient sum- 
mary of all these impressions is the 
French summing up of the principles 

which the French thought out before 
129 



130 Constberattons bp tbe Ma^ 

us, although we apphed it in practice 
before them. ''Uncle Sam," accord- 
ing to the eloquent speech of Gen. 
Patrick Collins at one of the Demo- 
cratic conventions which nominated 
Grover Cleveland, is ''the child of 
Revolution nurtured on Philosophy." 
There was no thought of French phi- 
losophy in the minds of the great 
majority of the Continental Congress 
in Philadelphia. Like Edie Ochiltree 
in Scott's novel, they were ' ' nae liberty- 
men," and like him they stood upon 
"the prerogative" of British subjects. 
His colleagues of his committee allowed 
the bookish young Jefferson to under- 
pin their Declaration of Independence 
with what philosophic support he might 
have derived from his reading, regard- 
ing his glittering generalities as pad- 
ding, and being themselves intent only 



(Tonstberattons b^ tbe Ma^ 131 

upon asserting their ''prerogatives" as 
British yeomen or British squires. As 
their friend and advocate Burke was 
to put it, a dozen years later, they 
''claimed their franchises, not on ab- 
stract principles, as the 'Rights of 
Men ' but as the rights of Englishmen, 
and as a patrimony derived from their 
forefathers." That they were found- 
ing a new nation upon the principles of 
the "Contrat Social" would have been 
an abhorrent proposition to such of 
them as had ever heard of Rousseau. 
The motto into which French lucidity 
condensed republican aspirations would 
assuredly have been rejected by them. 
And yet one is forced to revert to 
the French epigram, and to say that 
the triumph of American democracy 
is a triumph of "Liberty, Equality, 
Fraternity." 



I. LIBERTY. 

Liberty is plainly enough the prime 
factor in this great success. What 
Mr. G. W. Steevens said of the aspect 
of New York may be said, with equal 
accuracy, of the aspect of the whole 
continent: ''It is the outward expres- 
sion of the freest, fiercest individu- 
alism." Therein, if therein alone, it 
commends itself to the Briton from 
whom, surely, we derive the freedom 
and the ferocity of our individualism. 
Refractory and reactionary Britons 
there be who would object to it on that 
ground. Thomas Carlyle might, and 
logically must, have objected to the 
Nebraska farmer tilling his soil and 
planting his trees, as to the Nevada 
132 



Xlbert^ 133 



miner prospecting on his individual 
account, on the ground that he was 
''an anarchical object," there being 
nobody to ''boss" him or to throw 
stones or snap blacksnakes at him 
while he broke the stubborn glebe. 
The only settlement which could prop- 
erly have commended itself to the 
sage was the Mormon migration That 
was ordered and hierarchical enough 
to please him. In sooth, the Mormon 
migration was a great success. It is 
questionable whether the valley of the 
Great Salt Lake would have been, even 
now, turned into the land flowing with 
milk and honey that it is, but for the 
business foresight and provident energy 
of the Mormon leader, who marshaled 
and directed the migration, not merely 
nor mainly from the valley of the 
Mississippi, which had already become 



134 (ronst&erations b^ tbe Ma^ 

untenable for the followers of Joseph 
Smith, but from all those parts of 
Europe in which converts to Mormon- 
ism and colonists for the Great Salt 
Lake were to be gathered. Nobody- 
will pretend, in behalf of Carlyle, that 
he made a specialty of candor. But it 
is only candid to recall that, recurring 
in his old age (according to Froude) , to 
the recipe of emigration he had pre- 
scribed in his prime, together with the 
recipe of education, as the solvent of 
the ''Condition of England Question," 
he had the candor to own that in his 
own lifetime this part of the problem 
had been settled, by the mere action 
of supply and demand, better than it 
could have been settled by the em- 
bodied wisdom of the governing classes 
of Europe. On the other hand, it is 
arguable that the subordination and 



Xibert^ 13s 



obedience arising from religious faith 
were essential to the settlement of 
Utah, when it was a thousand miles 
removed from the nearest outpost of 
civilization. 

But at any rate Utah was the only 
exception. Ever3rwhere else, ''The 
Winning of the West" has been 
accomplished by the free and fierce 
individualism which is, as we say, the 
Anglo-Saxon birthright, and in the 
triumphs of which our British brother 
can take part, since, ' ' excipiendis excep- 
tis," they are his triumphs also. The 
civilization of the West, I repeat, would 
have been a great blow to Carlyle and 
his specialty of ''government" and 
anti-Anarchism. But even his rock- 
ribbed prejudices in favor of coercion 
and supervision would have been, must 



136 Constberations bp tbe Ximap 

have been, unsettled if he had had the 
opportunity of taking this transcon- 
tinental trip which we have been 
taking, and of seeing ''what hath Man 
wrought" when Man is simply emanci- 
pated and turned loose to follow his 
own sense of his own interest. He 
would have been forced to admit, on 
the prairies of Nebraska, that ''der big 
brass-hat pizness does not make der 
trees grow." " Laissez faire " is a French 
phrase but a British belief. ''Every 
Man in His Humor" is as British in 
phrasing as in sentiment. That simply 
to unlock the human energies is the 
way to make them most productive 
is a creed virtually confined to the Eng- 
lish-speaking peoples. The triumphs 
of its practical application over the 
width of the American continent they 
can all equally share. What, they 



Xlbert^ 137 



may with equal confidence inquire, 
what would the very ideal of a benevo- 
lent despot have made of this continent 
compared with what has been made 
of it by the unfettered and individual 
action of the members of our great 
democracy ? 



II. EQUALITY. 

It is at this next stage of the apphca- 
tion of the French version of the motto 
of the American democracy that the 
two branches of the Enghsh-speaking 
race ramify and part company. The 
most appreciative and sympathetic 
observer of the progress of ''Liberty," 
in the sense of unhampered individual- 
ism, is, doubtless, after the American 
himself, the Englishman, or the English- 
speaking man of colonial or ''depen- 
dent" affiliations. But, when one 
comes to attribute political and social 
successes to the working of the princi- 
ple of equality, to the extent of the 
abolition of all artificial distinctions 
among mankind, the Englishman, 
13S 



BqiiaUtp 139 



especially the ''well born" and "well 
bred" Englishman, is almost the worst 
possible judge of the result. His very 
birth and breeding retain him on the 
other side. A Frenchman is a far better 
as being a far more open-minded judge. 
And in this sense it is particularly a 
pity that our national culture should 
be so exclusively British, and that, up 
to a time within the lifetime of men not 
yet old, we should so meekly have sub- 
mitted to the application of British 
social standards to our own so totally 
different conditions. ' ' Liberty, ' ' in the 
sense of individualism, the Briton 
understands as well as we do. I am 
not prepared to maintain that he does 
not understand it even better. But 
Equality and Fraternity, the other 
two elements of the democratic idea, 
he does not understand at all, and dis- 



140 Considerations b^ tbe Ma^ 

believes in them with a conviction 
exceeding even his incomprehension. 
And yet, this great success of ours is 
as much a trophy of EquaHty and 
Fraternity as of Liberty. The things 
are really inextricable and indistin- 
guishable. 

I remember talking with a ' ' bright ' ' 
Englishman in Paris, in 1900, an Eng- 
lishman who has since distinguished 
himself in literary work, and by the 
most just title, and casually observing 
that I liked the French people because 
they were patriotic, because they real- 
ized their motto, and because Liberty, 
Equality, Fraternity were to them 
something more than mere words. I 
had no notion of provoking antago- 
nism or controversy. But my English- 
man took me up short, and told me a 



JEqualit^ 141 



story, by way of disproving my allega- 
tion of the French allegiance to equal- 
ity, importing that some French actress, 
let us say, had been received by an 
English Duke, whom some French 
''Due" had markedly declined to re- 
ceive. This as an instance that British 
"society" was really more democratic 
than French. The fact so clearly was 
that a British Duke could do with 
impunity whatever he chose to do, 
and that a French Due could not, 
that for the moment it paralyzed my 
powers of repartee. A hundred years 
hence, or less, the British peer may be 
deprived of his legislative powers. But, 
even so, one foresees that his tremen- 
dous and baleful social influence is 
likely to remain what it is now. It 
is imbedded, with the aid of the cate- 
chism, in the British Constitution. The 



142 Constberattons bp tbe Ma^ 

French ''aristocracy" is of no more 
practical avail than the American 
"Four Hundred." It is an institution 
which imposes only upon the willing, 
and has no relation to the general life 
of the nation. That any intelligent 
man — and my friend was highly in- 
telligent — should compare this melan- 
choly survival, disestablished for a 
hundred years — since surely Louis 
Napoleon's pinchbeck titles do not 
count — not only legally and politi- 
cally, but also socially, with the Brit- 
ish aristocracy, that huge blight and 
handicap of the British Empire in the 
modern international competition, this 
was, in sooth, a revelation. 

It was, and one may say it had to be, 
an Englishman who took up his parable 
against the democratic idea, as em- 



Bquallti^ 143 



bodied in the French formula. It is a 
full generation ago that Fitz James 
Stephens, afterward Mr. Justice Stephen 
and Sir James Fitz James, entered his 
protest against the way the world was 
going, in a book expressly entitled 
''Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," all 
three, even the first, being thus marked 
for animadversion. Even ''Liberty" 
which a Briton is born to appreciate, 
came in, at least Liberty in John Stuart 
Mill's appreciation of the term, as 
perhaps it had to. A very able and 
vigorous "kick" the book was, as all 
its readers know, even though it be far 
more evident now than it was then that 
it was a kick against the pricks, an 
expression of discontent with the way 
the world was inevitably going. It 
was not more emphatic than explicit. 
Its object, according to its author, was 



144 Constberattons b^ tbe Wia^ 

*'to examine the doctrines which are 
rather hinted at than expressed by the 
phrase." And his thesis was that 
''when used collectively, the words do 
not typify, however vaguely, any state 
of society which a reasonable man 
ought to regard with enthusiasm or 
self-devotion." The great achieve- 
ment of our own democracy, that 
which we have been witnessing in the 
conversion of the great wilderness, 
"wherewith the mower filleth not his 
hand, neither he that bindeth up the 
sheaves his bosom," within a human 
lifetime, into countless human homes, 
while attributing it correctly to ''the 
enormous development of equality in 
America," he describes, in passing, as 
" the rapid production of an immense 
multitude of commonplace, self-satis- 
fied, and essentially slight people." 



Bqualit^ 145 



American democracy had by no means 
had its perfect work in 1870. It has 
done enough and gone far enough 
since to make it certain that, while 
there may be EngHshmen who still 
hold the view of it thus expressed then, 
no responsible Englishman capable of 
expressing it would now venture to 
express it. Poor, able, pugnacious, 
insular, British James Fitz James! 
His life should have been prolonged 
till he could have beheld this day and 
taken this transcontinental trip with 
us. 

It does, in truth, require a miracle 
of imaginative sympathy to enable a 
well-placed Englishman to understand 
what is doing on this continent. Sir 
James Fitz James probably did not 
pride himself upon his open-minded- 



146 Consiberattons b^ tbe Wia^ 

ness, and he had never visited this 
country. Matthew Arnold did, and 
had. Moreover, before he came he 
had combated, as one of the results, 
perhaps, of his sympathetic study of 
the great French nation, the British 
notion of a permanent and fixed in- 
equality as one of the constituent 
elements of a great state. Answering 
the contention of one Sir William Moles - 
worth, apparently adopted by Mr. 
Gladstone, that, with the English 
people at large, ''the love of aristoc- 
racy," in other words, the love of in- 
equality, was "a religion," he took a 
text, "Choose Equality" from Menan- 
der, and meandered about it, in his 
delightful way, through a lecture ' ' de- 
livered at the Royal Institution" to 
insinuate that Mr. Gladstone and Sir 
William Molesworth, in planting them- 



lEQiialtt^ 147 



selves upon the Catechism of the Church 
of England, were not altogether secure 
of ''the approval of time and of the 
world." It was Mr. Gladstone, by the 
way, who, before some parliamentary 
committee, when he was Prime Minister 
of England, being asked whether he was 
not an intimate friend of some Duke, 
say of Newcastle, necessarily his intel- 
lectual and political inferior, made 
humble answer: ''His Grace and myself 
are as intimate as the differences in our 
stations will allow," a catechismal 
reply involving a mental attitude abso- 
lutely inconceivable to an American. 
Matthew Arnold not only, with Men- 
ander, "chose equality," but indicated 
a distinct apprehension that equality 
was a good thing, would be a good 
thing even for the England with 
which he invariably and perhaps 



148 donstbetatlons bp tbe Wia^ 

necessarily dealt as an aggregation of 
** classes," which is to say of castes. 
He showed more than an artistic appre- 
ciation of Wordsworth's line 

Of Joy in widest commonalty spread. 

He showed a human exultation in the 
thought. And yet, when he came to 
visit the favored land in which Joy is 
in fact in widest commonalty spread, 
he found that he did not like it, and 
he frankly avowed that his dislike was 
founded precisely upon its lack of 
"distinction" and its want of suitable 
and special provision for the class of 
* ' gentlemen . ' ' Therein he showed him- 
self less appreciative of the American 
idea, and to that extent less of a philoso- 
pher than a British tourist of the pre- 
ceding generation, Anthony Trollope, 
to wit, who, being Britannically re- 



jEqualtt^ 149 



volted by the airs of equality taken 
by his Bostonian hackman, was yet 
candid enough to own that the hack- 
man might be a better citizen precisely 
for being, from the Britannic point of 
view, a worse hackman. It is at least 
worth noting that Mr. Arnold did not 
reprint the paper in which his com- 
plaint appeared. One hopes the omis- 
sion may have been due to a percep- 
tion that his complaint was that nobody 
was abased that he might he exalted, 
that he was ashamed to complain that 
the ^comfort of the units was sacrificed 
to the happiness of the millions, and 
that he recalled the injunction of his 
poetical master' 

Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels. 

Such instances go to show the negli- 
gibility, from the American point of 



I50 Considerations b^ tbe IKIlap 

view, of British criticisms of American 
''institutions," especially of the Ameri- 
can institution of equality. The Brit- 
ish tourist simply cannot help miss- 
ing in America the conveniences, the 
diminution of social friction by social 
lubrication, which he enjoys at home. 
One may question, indeed, whether he 
has a right as a human being to enjoy 
what he does as a member of the Brit- 
ish ''upper classes." It is a quarter of 
a century since I was nauseated by the 
obsequiousness and servility of the 
guide who forced himself, very civilly, 
upon me at Oxford, thumbing once 
more a hat brim already over thumbed. 
He was an educated man, a man of my 
race and speech, even though alcohol- 
ically degraded from his rightful place 
among men "a classical scholar and 
gentleman " after the pattern of Tufton 



D 



Bqualtt^ 151 



Hunt, in Thackeray's ''Philip:" possi- 
bly also a clergyman, though, like the 
Rev. Tufton, he ''sank that." And 
he whiningly quarreled with the amount 
of my gratuity, and made me do his 
blushing for him and for the dignity of 
human nature. I am afraid that the 
well-placed Briton would not have 
shared my blushes. At any rate the 
well-placed Briton would have reserved 
his blushes for the social degradation 
of the man who had dropped several 
rungs down "this whole ladder of de- 
pendence," which according to a Brit- 
ish classic, Henry Fielding, constitutes 
the British social system, and would 
not have found it requisite to blush for 
the merely human abjection of the 
servility. But it is easy to under- 
stand that the well-placed Briton does 
ont enjoy going about in America. 



152 Constberattons b^ tbe Ma^ 

*' Money," says Mr. Kipling, ''cannot 
buy service in America." No, thank 
God! Not that kind. 

And yet it is at this point, at the 
increase or diminution of social friction 
in connection with personal service, 
that the American system shows to the 
least advantage in comparison with the 
European system. We need not make 
too much of Mr. Arnold's avowal that 
he was made more comfortable in 
traveling on the other side than on 
this side in order to admit that ''they 
order these matters better" abroad. 
In fact every American who has been 
in Europe knows it. Who is to do the 
work, especially what we call the 
"menial" work, which is supposed to 
degrade the performer, and which is 
compensated by "tips," the tip being 



Bqualtt^ 153 



by hypothesis a "quantum meruit," 
fixed by the beneficiary, for personal 
service for which no fixed charge exists ? 
What becomes of ''equaHty" between 
the tipper and the tippee? It is all 
very well for Count Tolstoy, in his 
character as Christian Socialist under 
Russian conditions, to maintain that 
everybody ought to do for himself 
those offices which are recognized as 
''menial," which is to say, degrading. 
The rest of us have something more 
pressing to do than to carry out our 
social theories to this point of rigor. 
Very well, too, for Mr. Hopkinson 
Smith, on the eve of his departure for 
Europe to assume the character of 
Tippoo Sahib, and boldly to proclaim 
that he ' ' loves to tip ' ' and that the tip 
blesses equally him that gives and him 
or her who takes. But neither of these 



154 Considerations by tbe May 

solutions quite reaches the American 
problem. 

A solution was once reached, in 
San Francisco, about a generation ago, 
as was recorded by an ingenious and 
ingenuous British tourist of that time. 
''Me man," he represents himself as 
accosting a roustabout on the wharf, 
"what will it cost me to have this 
portmanteau carried to the hotel?" 
"Will it take two to carry it?" "In- 
deed, no." "Then carry it yourself." 
It must have been a particularly 
magnanimous British tourist who re- 
cords this homage to the spirit of 
equality. It is no wonder that the 
commoner sort of British tourist re- 
pines to find that service cannot be 
had for money. Arnold himself, in 
whom, according to Mr. Watson, 



lEqualtt^ iss 



Something of worldling mingled still 
With bard and sage, 

might have been excused for missing 
the ready British obsequiousness excit- 
able by threepence. At the gates of 
the New Jerusalem itself he might have 
resented, in his character of British 
visitor of the upper class, the non- 
appearance of a British sub -angel of 
the lower class, doing his catechismal 
duty in that state of eternity to which 
it had pleased Providence to call him, 
with the front brim of his modest 
aureole already dingy with much 
thumbing, still ordering himself lowly 
and reverently to all his betters, and 
waiting to bear a hand with the lug- 
gage. What, in fact, would heaven 
be to a British visitor of the select 
upper class without at the very least, 
a ''private sitting room"? It remains 



156 Consiberattons bp the Map 

true that you do not compensate your 
equal by means of tips, and that tip- 
ping is a derogation of democracy. 
One American white man does not 
receive gratuities from another Ameri- 
can white man. To this effect that 
lovely tale of Maurice Kingsley's about 
the Caucasian conductor of the Pull- 
man car, somewhat sophisticated and 
corrupted out of his birthright by the 
messes of pottage his passengers had 
been "lowering his moral tone" withal, 
and who had been particularly polite to 
a lady traveling with her two children 
all the way from Omaha to Ogden. 
This in the old days, when cars were 
changed at Ogden, at which point he 
debarked the party and the packages 
on the platform, explained to the lady 
where and when her train might be 
expected, and then stood with supine 



Bquallt^ 157 



and expectant palm. ''Instead of 
which" the better American ungloved 
her own and extended it with, ''I don't 
know what we should have done, sir, 
but for all your kindness." Whereto, 
he, at once abashed and exalted, ''By 
, Madam, you do me proud." 

Ef I don't make his meanin' clear, perhaps in 
some respex I can, 

I know that "every man" don't mean a nig- 
ger or a Mexican. 

In fact, our practical notions of 
equality include only the white Cauca- 
sian, native to this soil, or thoroughly 
naturalized upon it. It takes a very 
tender civic conscience indeed to under- 
go compunctions about tipping a Euro- 
pean waiter in a restaurant for fear of 
undermining his self-respect, and you 
are quite sure that your forbearance 
in that respect and on that ground will 



is8 Constberations b^ tbe Map 

not be appreciated. And then, which 
is much more to the purpose in travel- 
ing, there is the whole Afro-American 
race. I wonder if any evangelist has 
gone about to persuade the Afro- 
American in general that he is lower- 
ing the dignity of his manhood and his 
citizenship by taking tips, and I also 
wonder, or rather I do not, what would 
become of that evangelist ! How lucky 
that one's comfort in traveling is for 
the most part confided to that estima- 
ble race, with the consciousness on 
both sides that at the journey's end 
''there are certain piacles." As to the 
Pullman porter, his ethnic genius for 
catching his sleep in snatches keeps 
him without a rival in that field. You 
may grumble at the high degree of heat, 
at night particularly, in which he 
luxuriates and you suffer, although I 



lEquallt^ 159 



am authoritatively informed that this 
is not his fault, and that it is on account 
of the Pullmanic belief, how reached I 
know not, that 75 Fahrenheit is a 
normal sleeping temperature that you 
find it maintained. At any rate, there 
is something highly comforting in an 
obliging ' ' boy, ' ' whether as porter or as 
waiter, if your social conscience be not 
morbidly tender about the quid pro 
quo. My esteemed friend, if he will 
allow me to call him so, Mr. Ernest V. 
Smith, who so ably and genially presides 
over the smoker of the ''Wolverine" 
between New York and Chicago, in- 
forms me that there is an ''American 
Association of Railway Employees," 
of which he has the honor to be presi- 
dent, confined to porters, waiters, and 
cooks, in other words to employees of 
color, of which the object is to protect 



i6o Const^erattons bp tbe Ma^ 

the road's passengers by vouching for 
the trustworthiness of its members, 
and which, moreover, offers to the 
Afro-American employees the same de- 
sirable advantages that are offered to 
the Caucasian employees by the ' ' rail- 
road branches" of the Young Men's 
Christian Association. More power to 
the elbow of the American Association 
of Railway Employees. 

It remains true that much friction 
arises, and some impugnment of the 
doctrine of equality, when you are 
served ''menially" by a man of your 
own race and blood. There was a bell- 
boy at the Hotel Angelus, in Los 
Angeles, to whom I confided a pair of 
unmentionables for necessary repairs, 
forgetting that there was a pocket- 
book in one of the pockets thereof. He 



lEQUaltt^ i6i 



went away gaily brandishing the article 
of raiment in question, only to return 
in two minutes and slap the pocket- 
book down before me with the remark, 
''Now, I hope that will teach you not 
to be so careless another time." I did 
not resent his attitude, however odd it 
was for a tippee in expectation to take 
to a tipper in expectation. But I did 
resent the Caucasian crew of the dining 
car on the Southern Pacific next day, 
who indicated their equal Americanism 
by taking superior airs , airs mounting to 
the height of insolence, and did what 
they could to mar the pleasure of the 
trip. Under such condition a tip be- 
comes a ' ' holdup. ' ' To recur to Goethe : 
''When a man shows himself a boor 
to show himself my equal, he does not 
show himself my equal ; he only shows 
himself a boor." All the same it is a 



i62 ConBt^erattons b^ tbe Wia^ 

question what we are going to do for 
"service" compatibly with the Ameri- 
can principle of equality, when the 
supply of Africa and Asia and un- 
naturalized Europe gives out. But 
the question cannot yet be called press- 
ing, 



III. FRATERNITY. 

The third member of the trinity of 
the French epigram is as essential as 
either of the other two. If the trinity 
were not indivisible one might almost 
say that it was the most essential. 
''The unity of the community" is the 
excellent jingling motto of the Chamber 
of Commerce of Los Angeles. Nobody 
who knows the amazing things that 
have been done in the way of market- 
ing and proclaiming their products 
throughout the world by the fruit 
growers of Southern California, whose 
chief organ we may perhaps take this 
Chamber of Commerce to be, will be 
disposed to dispute that it has vindi- 
cated the motto. But the motto is 
163 



i64 Considerations b^ tbe Wia^ 

extensible even to a ''continental" 
signification. The "unity of the com- 
munity, ' ' the ' ' solidarity ' ' of the United 
States, is one of the first and one of 
the last impressions you derive from 
a transcontinental trip. Take, to 
begin with, the essential matter of 
language. Evidently you cannot, any- 
where else on the planet, go three 
thousand miles straight on end from 
home and find everybody, not merely 
intelligible, but in no sense strange, in 
his speech. It is true that on the 
Pacific Coast " Betcherlife " takes the 
place of the corresponding affirmative 
answer to a casual inquiry, ''Sure," 
and with no more consciousness of 
jocosity on the one slope than on the 
other. Apart from this locution the 
New Yorker does not meet anybody 
who does not talk not only his language 



ffraterntt^ 165 



but his dialect. Professor Freeman was 
not what you may call a wide-minded 
world citizen. His cheerful view of 
our own future was sufficiently dis- 
closed in the book he published, or at 
least announced, at the crisis of our 
Civil War: "A History of Federal 
Government from the Formation of the 
Achaian League to the Disruption of 
the United States." But all the same, 
when he had actually visited these 
shores, or perhaps only this shore, he 
had the candor to profess, about 
''American English," that whereas he 
had never heard an American, in 
America speaking English which he 
did not understand, he had heard 
many Englishmen in England speak- 
ing English which he did not under- 
stand. I on my part profess that there 
were only two of my casual interlocu- 



i66 (Ionsl^erations bp tbe ma^ 

tors on this transcontinental trip who 
spoke a dialect in any way strange to 
me. One was a railroad man from 
whose lips dropped the unmistakable, 
languorous, and delightful intonation 
of tide-water Virginia ; the other a news- 
paper man, speaking a variant of the 
same, and, upon question, avowing 
himself a Kentuckian. 

Whence is it that we derive our other 
most pronounced national trait, our 
undiscourageable optimism? Is it the 
product of our "institutions," or is it 
merely in the air of our continent? A 
comparison of ourselves with our north- 
em and Canadian neighbors might 
help to determine that question. But 
the optimism is nevertheless a great 
fact. Emerson says, ''We judge a 
man's wisdom by his hope." If we 



ffraternttp 167 



likewise judge a nation's wisdom, as- 
suredly we are the wisest of nations. 
For there is no American, in all this 
transcontinental range, who has not 
"his eye fixed on the future" and with 
a firm belief. Some pages back I was 
honestly envying Stevenson's skill as 
a landscape painter in words. But I 
should not choose him to celebrate my 
country. He has frankly told why: 

To-morrow for the States : for me 
England and Yesterday. 

What truly is to happen when the 
Land without a Future confronts the 
Land without a Past? ''Survives Im- 
agination to the change superior?" 
If she survives, she is transmuted. 
''Imagination," in our West, is simply 
"the substance of things hoped for, 
the evidence of things unseen;" and a 



i68 Constberations b^ tbe Wa^ 

better name for her would be the 
Scriptural name of "Faith." In this 
sense the American people are the most 
believing people in the world. The 
natural product of imagination in Eu- 
rope, with its storied past, may very 
probably be the historical romance. 
The natural product of imagination 
in our America, with its empty past and 
its crowded future, may be an honest 
''prospectus," if you can imagine such 
a thing. 

I have already quoted that ''native 
proverb" which I owe to Mr. Kipling: 
' ' I met a hundred men on the road to 
Delhi, and they were all my brothers." 
Allow me to quote it again, for the sake 
of emphasizing a slight but possibly 
significant exception to the rule of 
American fraternity. In those delight- 



ffraternitp 169 



ful "London Films" of Mr. Howells, 
which the judicious and fortunate 
among us have all been reading, he 
deprecates the desire of certain among 
his countrymen in England of being 
taken nationally rather than person- 
ally, for the exquisite concluding 
reason, " I do not like all the Americans 
myself." We have all met in Europe 
this kind of American who insists upon 
being taken nationally, but have met 
him, I suppose, no more nor oftener 
than we had to. But the Easterner 
in the Middle West finds himself, in 
spite of himself, taken sectionally rather 
than personally. I by no means mean 
that every Middle Westerner he meets 
takes him in that way, I only mean 
that everybody he meets who takes 
him in that way is a Middle Westerner. 
It may never have occurred to a New 



lyo Considerations b^ tbe Wa^ 

Yorker, so long as he stayed at home, 
to frame any excuse for being a New 
Yorker, there were so many to keep 
him company in that calamitous state. 
But in the Middle West he finds that 
the tag to his introduction, ''of New 
York," operates as a scarlet provoca- 
tive. He is, in effect, informed that 
he is a semi -foreigner, and that it is 
impossible he should understand what 
he has always imagined to be his own 
country. As a joke this is possibly 
good, though it scarcely occurs to your 
Middle Western friend that after a few 
days of continual intercourse it may 
be capable of palling. But it is more 
than a joke. It is often a fixed idea. 
If Mr. Kipling's "An [N. B., not 
''The"] American" exists anywhere 
any longer it must be in the Middle 
West. 



ffraterntti? 171 



Blatant, he bids the world bow down, 
Or cringing begs a crumb of praise. 

''A crumb of praise" not for himself 
individually nor for his country, but 
for his "section." My experience this 
trip began at dinner in Chicago, out- 
ward bound, when a young gentleman, 
challenged by the suffix ''of New 
York," kindly gave me an elementary 
lecture across the table on the basis 
and meaning of American institutions. 
The Coaster, I repeat, or the Intra- 
montane, is quite free from this pro- 
vinciality. He takes you personally, 
or he takes you nationally, as his 
countryman. But your existence does 
not make each particular hair of him 
to stand on end. If you do not like 
his things you are kindly welcome to 
lump them. It was of course not a 
Coaster, it was necessarily a Middle 



172 Constberattons bi? tbe limai^ 

Westerner, who asked me, in the hand- 
some rooms of the Jonathan Club in 
Los Angeles, a club, as so many more 
are coming to be, which is the tenant of 
a floor in a skyscraper: ''Well, now, 
how does this compare with clubs in 
New York ? ' ' What can you say to a 
sectionalist like that? You are 

tempted to reply, in the words of 
Private Ortheris, " 'Strewth A'mighty! 
I'm a man." 

The Far Easterner very gratefully 
misses in the Far West, meaning spe- 
cifically upon the Coast, but meaning 
also the intramontane region, this 
disposition to treat him as an outsider 
which he cannot help finding in the 
Middle West. It is true that two 
Coasters, encountered separately, be- 
gan their several discourses upon the 



dfraterntt^ 173 



Chinese question with an identical 
preface: "You people in the East 
don't understand this question," — 
before developing diametrically oppo- 
site views upon it. It is true that the 
Intramontane may tell you, as one 
friendly Intramontane told me, that 

his region has advantages over yours 

• 

for the rearing of American citizens, 
capable of coping with whatever emer- 
gency may arise. "You see," was the 
way this Intramontane put it, "a man 
who amounts to anything between 
these mountains knows everybody 
worth knowing in six or seven States. 
And," he ecstatically concluded, "they 
all call him Bill." That "East or 
West, hame's best," is a pious opinion 
which anybody is free to hold and is 
very likely to be the better for holding. 
The sentiment of patriotism is doubt- 



174 Consiberations b^ tbe Ma^ 

less an enlargement merely of the 
domestic affections. But if they do 
not enlarge they do not become patri- 
otism. The "man of Boston raisin' " 
was the target of hostile suspicion in the 
mind of Dickens's ''brown forester," 
sixty years ago. He has been sup- 
planted in that capacity by the New 
Yorker. It seems that the same super- 
sensitiveness to European opinion 
which existed in all parts of the country 
at the time of the publication of 
''Martin Chuzzlewif and "American 
Notes," and even more at the time, 
ten years before, of the publication of 
Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic Manners of 
the Americans," still subsists in the 
Middle West, only it has been trans- 
ferred to "Eastern" opinion. It is 
true that Mrs. Trollope's book was 
really a friendly book, recording only 



ffraterntt^ 175 



the impressions that an EngUsh lady 
was bound to form of the Cincinnati 
of 1830, and that Dickens was an 
avowed caricaturist. We no longer 
have it as a nation. We are grown up, 
nationally speaking. If you tell a 
Londoner, in London, that you do not 
like the place, he not only does not 
resent your dislike, but it is as likely 
as not that he will cheerfully agree 
with you: "Ah, yes. Beastly hole, 
isn't it? " We have not in New York 
quite attained that wise indifference 
of the wise when a Londoner does not 
like New York, and expresses himself 
with insular frankness to that effect. 
But we flatter ourselves that that is 
because we individually are doing the 
honors of our country, and are solicit- 
ous that he should have a good time in 
our country, not that we really care 



176 Constberattons b^ tbe Mai^ 

whether he Hkes it or not. Really to 
care would be provincial. A consider- 
ate writer once wrote that the Ameri- 
can was prepared to maintain that he 
was nationally better than an English- 
man only to fend off the assumption 
which he apprehended that he was not 
so good. "A Certain Condescension 
in Foreigners," which the average 
American may have apprehended, be- 
fore we became the signal success we 
are now all conscious of being, is suc- 
ceeded in the Middle West by the 
apprehension of a like condescension 
in Easterners, even on the part of an 
Easterner who altogether guiltless, to his 
own consciousness, of having any other 
desire respecting his Middle Western 
brother than, in the words of the old 
Masonic rhyme, to meet upon the 
level, and to part upon the square. 



Jfraterntt^ 177 



It is perfectly in vain that the baited 
Easterner, who does not in the least 
desire to be known as an Easterner, 
but only as an American, struggles to 
point out to these monopolists and 
cornerers of Americanism that the 
typical American of this generation, 
the man who is equally at home from 
Mount Desert to San Diego, and from 
Seattle to Key West, happens also to 
be a native of Manhattan Island, where 
he was born and bred, like his ancestors 
to the third and fourth generation. 
Everybody knows that that dreadful 
'' break " of Mr. Bryan's ten years ago 
about the ''enemy's country" would 
be quite out of the question for Theo- 
dore Roosevelt, as for any other all- 
American. But I can find no reason 
to suppose that that dreadful remark 
jarred at all upon the patriotic sensi- 



17^ Consiberattons b^ tbe Ma^ 

bilities of the convinced Middle West- 
erner, the Middle Westerner of the 
fixed sectional idea, or that he regarded 
it as anything but a commonplace and 
casual statement of fact. And yet 
this same restricted American it is who 
accuses you, you of the Eastern slope, 
especially you the New Yorker, of being 
' ' provincial ' ' and ' ' un-American. ' ' 
Truly enough, as Dean Swift puts it, 
it is idle to expect that ' ' reasoning will 
make a man correct an ill opinion which 
by reasoning he never acquired." 

I am afraid that it is our esteemed 
Four Hundred that have brought about 
this thing. The Middle Westerner who 
comes to New York and sees, say, 
white men in livery and dock-tailed 
horses, is apparently disposed to hold 
every New Yorker he meets responsible 



ffraternlt^ 179 



for every one of those ' ' un-American 
additions or privations. It does not 
matter that you may disapprove of 
them as decidedly as he, holding, with 
the good Washington Irving, that the 
first man who mutilated a horse in this 
manner had ' ' a vulgar soul ' ' or that a 
badge of private servitude is improper 
to an American citizen. The Middle 
Westerner whom these things have 
caused to gnash the teeth of patriot- 
ism and foam at the mouth of ' ' nativ- 
ismus" continues, it seems, to hold 
you personally responsible for them. 
Rationally this is highly absurd. Why 
should any American, unless he happens 
to be a born snob, disquiet himself 
because those ''fri voles," who may 
have more money than brains, and 
who may even have possibly more 
than their exact share of the ''super- 



i8o Con6t^eration5 b^ tbe Map 

flux" of American prosperity, should 
choose to spend their money in absurd 
and fantastic ways? Let the Middle 
Westerner read ''The House of Mirth," 
which, by the way, was the precise 
volume, acquired at Oakland, at which 
I had only the chance of an hour or 
two on the Nevada Desert to read, and 
no other opportunity until I was east 
of Buffalo. That very impressive 
modern instance of the wise saw of 
Ecclesiastes, implicated in the title, 
that ' ' The heart of fools is in the house 
of mirth," and of that other wise saw 
of the good Dr. Watts that 

Satan finds some mischief still 
For idle hands to do, 

should surely excite rather the pity 
than the envy of the Westerner, Middle 
or Far, as well as of the Easterner who 



jfraternit^ iSi 



has occasion to be thankful that his 
own hands have been kept from that 
dangerous idleness. 

In truth the sentiment of the West 
toward the East in general, and toward 
New York in particular, should be one 
of deep sympathy. For of the immense 
attractiveness of this country as an 
asylum for ''the oppressed of all coun- 
tries and the martyrs of every creed" 
poor old New York is paying the ex- 
pense. She is the vicarious sacrifice 
for the aggrandizement of the West. 
The enterprising, the adventurous, the 
responsible, the hopeful, of the great 
immigration push on to the West, to 
the parts where 



She of the open heart and open door 

Has room about her hearth for all mankind. 



i82 Considerations b^ tbe Ma^ 

The inert, the helpless, the unservice- 
able among the immigrants, fall by the 
wayside, drop at the landing place, 
become a burden and problem for the 
great port which sifts automatically 
this huge influx, swelling, to be sure, 
its own tables of population, but 
swelling also its bill of charities for 
dependants and aggravating its rate 
of mortality. The considerate West- 
erner may say of the Sacrificial City: 

Yes, we arraign her; but she 
The weary Titan, with deaf 
Ears, and labor-dimmed eyes, 
Regarding neither to right 
Nor left, goes passively by, 
Staggering on to her goal ; 
Bearing, on shoulders immense, 
Atlantean, the load, 
Well-nigh not to be borne, 
Of the too vast orb of her fate. 

And this the considerate and patriotic 
Westerner may say, even while the 



ffraterntti2 ^^3 



considerate and patriotic New Yorker, 
as a good American, recognizing that 
the local loss is the national gain, may 
be ^'saying or singing," according to 
his voice and tunefulness: 

And not by Eastern windows only, 

When daylight comes, comes in the light, 

In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly — 
But Westward, look, the land is bright. 

Meanwhile the ''commercial empo- 
rium" of the Middle West is, at least 
as an emporium, quite as impressive 
as the emporium of the Atlantic slope. 

Hell is a city, much like London, 
A populous and a smoky city. 

So is New York. So, quite equally, is 
Chicago. One is inclined to say even 
more so. Going back a block from the 
north end of the lake front one gets per- 
haps a stronger impression of the hell- 



i84 Considerations bp tbe Ma^ 

ish or metropolitan character than he 
can get anywhere on Manhattan Island. 
I have just given Shelley's charac- 
terization of urbanity, when raised to 
the metropolitan point. Then there is 
Horace's, which Chicago equally ful- 
fills: ''The smoke, the wealth, the roar 
of Rome. ' ' The ' ' f umus ' ' in the busi- 
ness part of Chicago is far denser and 
more grievous than anywhere in Man- 
hattan, owing, of course, to the unregu- 
lated consumption of soft coal, which 
converts the atmosphere into a murk 
through which the buildings loom all 
the more mirifically for thus being 
rendered ''ignote"; the ostentation of 
''opes" is at least equal to our own; 
the "strepitus," thanks largely to a 
recent and diabolical construction, 
through these smoky and wealthy 
parts, of a new elevated railroad, more 



jfraterntt^ 185 



intolerably nerve-racking than that of 
the business center of Manhattan, from 
which these instruments of torture are 
mercifully a little removed. The con- 
junction makes the aspect of this part 
of Chicago more ''metropolitan," I 
think, than is any aspect of New York. 

It may be true that Chicago has not 
so many ''objects of interest" to a 
stranger as New York, as New York, 
in turn, has not so many as many a 
European town of far less population. 
Time was when the unfriended stranger 
in Chicago who did not care about the 
theater, and had an evening to pass, 
could find nothing more to the pur- 
pose to do than to go and see "Jake" 
Schaefer play billiards at his rooms, 
and, on a subsequent visit, to go and 
watch the meteoric Frank Ives do the 



i86 Considerations b^ tbe Ma^ 

same thing. To be sure, this was in 
old days, "away back," before the 
Fair, and before the estabhshment of 
the Chicago Orchestra, another ''met- 
ropohtan" feature which Chicago has 
and New York lacks. There is far 
more to hear and to see in Chicago now 
than there was then. On this last 
visit, homeward bound, one could by 
no means grudge the hours of detention 
by daylight between trains which en- 
abled him to view the new Orchestra 
Hall, the final trophy and monument of 
the long-delayed fulfillment of the life- 
long ambition of Theodore Thomas; 
Mr. St. Gaudens's spirited and inspirit- 
ing equestrian figure of Logan on the 
lake front, and above all, which gave 
him the treat of being personally con- 
ducted by its author over Mr. Louis 
Sullivan's rational and artistic realiza- 



ffraternttp 187 



tion of the ideal of an American sky- 
scraper. The astonishing affluence of 
decorative genius lavished upon the de- 
tail of the structure has been seconded 
by an equally astonishing technical 
proficiency on the part of the iron 
molders and the wood workers, and the 
combination makes the building one of 
the most interesting sights to a student 
in this department that the country 
has to show. Nevertheless, the ulti- 
mate impression is rather pathetic. 
What are we about, one asks himself, 
when the artist who has shown his 
capability to set forth in the new and 
modern diction of his art what we 
really ''wish to say," instead of re- 
handling Latin verses, who could sing 
the ' ' Song of these States ' ' in the frozen 
music of his art, instead of being em- 
ployed upon his natural tasks of 



i88 consiberattons b^ tbe Ma^ 

public architecture, State or municipal, 
is shut up to toiling ''at Gaza in the 
mill with slaves," and casting his 
pearls before — well, not wholly appre- 
ciative spectators ? At least, irrelevant 
show cases hid some of the most ex- 
quisite of the detail. Or is it that the 
department store is really all that 
architecturally, we really ' ' wish to say" ? 
That would be a discouraging conclu- 
sion. 

"Fraternizing" is, naturally, the out- 
ward and visible sign of the inward 
and spiritual feeling of fraternity. Of 
course it is nowhere so ready and easy 
as in this country. ''Poor or boor," 
says Mr. Kipling, " is the man who 
cannot pick up a friend in America," 
and delivers himself of some just 
animadversions upon the behavior of 



ffratetnttp 189 



that countryman of his he met in the 
Yellowstone Park who warned him 
that ''you couldn't be too careful 
whom you talked to in those parts," 
and stalked on as ''fearing for his 
social chastity." That is distinctly a 
British trait, and as distinctly un- 
American. On this trip across the 
continent, if you are not ready to be 
hail fellow well met with the casual 
fellow-voyager, at least if you show 
any disposition to stand him off, it is 
certain that you will not have a good 
time. From San Francisco to Ogden 
we had the company, I cannot say the 
society, of a sweet-faced old lady, with 
her two daughters, also of amiable 
countenances. The trio kept them- 
selves to themselves, never emerging 
from their "stateroom" except for 
meals, and forming a marked excep- 



iQo Con9t^etatlons b^ tbe Ma^ 

tion to the rule of fraternizing and 
sororizing throughout the train. It was 
curious to note how generally it was 
resented, and how the other passengers 
wondered ''whether those people 
thought themselves better than any- 
body else." As a matter of fact, the 
seclusion was felt to be ''un-American." 

Readers of Mr Henry James's in- 
teresting and suggestive and difficult 
papers upon his revisitation of his 
native land will not have forgotten 
how his heart leaped up when he be- 
held that rainbow in the sky, the 
Harvard fence. He hastens to explain 
that it was not much of a fence, being 
neither impervious nor even opaque. 
But he hails it, nevertheless, as a bow 
of promise, a symbol of cloistrality, 
of seclusion, of privacy, a token of a 



ffraternit)? 191 



good time coming. Oh, no, one is 
prepared to say very decisively; that 
is not the way the American world 
is going, not that way, but quite the 
contrary way. For good or for evil, 
fencelessness, not fencing, is the ten- 
dency of our democracy, and ' ' Barriers 
Burned Away ' ' the course of our social 
evolution. The late E. L. Godkin was 
an illuminating and high-minded pub- 
licist, never to be mentioned by any 
American journalist without honor. 
He was perhaps in the European forum 
the most effective champion of Ameri- 
can democracy. His "apologias" for 
it against Sir Henry Maine and other 
reluctants, in the ' ' Problems of Modern 
Democracy" showed him to be, if not 
a convinced believer in modern demo- 
cracy, at least a cheerful acquiescent 
in its inevitability. And all this while, 



i92 Gonst^erattons bp tbe Mai? 

in his daily newspaper work, he was 
deahng modern democracy, with lacer- 
ating jabs, the faithful wounds of a 
friend. But although by his intellect 
and his hope he belonged to America 
and the future, by his personal and 
traditionary tastes and habits he be- 
longed to ''England and Yesterday," 
and to the last he remained an im- 
perfectly naturalized American. The 
roughness of equality, the uncouth - 
ness of fraternity, in their American 
varieties, never ceased to afflict him. 
There was a story he was fond of re- 
peating in print about the miner in the 
' ' hotel " of a mining camp who violently 
tore down the canvas screen behind 
which a party of tourists had essayed 
to shelter themselves, with the profane 
inquiry, ' ' what there was so pri- 
vate going on in there." It is a true 



Ifraterntti? 193 



parable. That daylight should be let 
in to the utmost on all public trans- 
actions entails a letting in of daylight 
upon transactions properly private, 
since the distinction is not always easy 
to draw, and since there is a consider- 
able number of persons professionally 
interested that it should not be drawn 
at all. I myself have been a witness 
to the intrusion of a casual reporter 
into a club in which everybody was 
interested in hushing up the details 
of an attempted suicide, appealing to 
the policeman to assist his invasion of 
the sacred precincts upon the ground 
that ' * this is a public matter. ' ' This is, 
if you choose, the seamy side of our 
democracy, the side which exposes it 
to the imputation of that ''vulgarity" 
which Mr. James, again, has justly de- 
scribed as " a question-begging word." 



194 donsiberattons b^ tbe Wa^ 

It is more or less relieved, all over our 
country, by the pervading ''cavalleria 
rusticana," when the question is of 
the feelings of women, but not re- 
lieved at all when the question is of the 
feelings of mere men. However it 
may be as a question of law, it seems 
that the decision of the Court of 
Appeals of the State of New York that 
there is no such thing as a right to pri- 
vacy is a registration of the actual 
social fact. And why, even so, should 
we repine, seeing that this, too, but 
exemplifies the saying of the good 
Emerson, most American of philoso- 
phers, if not most philosophic of Ameri- 
cans: "Only that good lasts which we 
can taste with all doors open, and 
which serves all men"? 



IV. TRIUMPHANT DEMOCRACY. 

"We stand the latest, and, if we fail, 
probably the last experiment of self- 
government by the people." These 
were the words of the excellent Mr. 
Justice Story of the Supreme Court 
of the United States, ''Story on the 
Constitution," ''Story on the Conflict 
of Laws," Story of the second genera- 
tion of Americans, of the generation 
of Webster and Clay, of the immediate 
successors of the founders of our 
Republic and our Empire, of the men 
who builded so immensely better than 
they knew. How queerly old-fash- 
ioned the doubtful and hesitating words 
now sound. And yet they were 

uttered in the course of a Fourth of 

195 



196 Constberattons bp tbe Ma^ 

July oration, delivered, I suppose, 
about the year 1830, not only within 
the lifetime, but within the recollec- 
tion, of many Americans now living. 
Mr. John Bigelow, for an illustrious 
example, might have heard that Fourth 
of July speech. A great deal of water 
has run under the bridge since then. 
We are not in the habit any more of 
making those timorous references to 
our ** experiment." Those bold blas- 
phemers who, in Judge Story's time, 
were insisting that man-made privi- 
leges and exclusions were God-made, 
that the tenures of thrones were part 
of the general order of Nature, that the 
occupants of those thrones held them 
by ''Divine Right" and were entitled 
to describe as "Holy" the alliances 
they contracted among themselves; 
where are they now? The ''experi- 



XTrtumpbant Democracy 197 

ment" is not only a success, it is the 
only success. The very shadow of its 
splendor, a splendor hardly visible in 
1830, in 1906 

disastrous twilight sheds 
On half the nations, and with fear of change 
Perplexes monarchs. 

It is not only quite certain that 
** government of the people, by the 
people, for the people shall not perish 
from the earth." It is as inevitable 
that all government less broadly based 
and firmly rooted shall so perish. 
That clear truth enables and encour- 
ages an American of mature age to sing 
his ''Nunc Dimittis." ''Believe it, 
the sweetest canticle," as Bacon wrote, 
at the highest pitch of his eloquence; 
and not only when "a man," but when 
a man's country and the country of his 



198 donsiDerattons b^ tbe XPttla^ 

children, ''hath obtained worthy ends 
and expectations." 

Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in 
peace, according to Thy word: 

For mine eyes have seen Thy salvation: 

Which Thou hast prepared before the face 
of all people; 

A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the 
glory of Thy people Israel. 



*' A truly superb book " 

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LIFE IN THE OPEN 

SPORT WITH ROD, GUN, HORSE, AND HOUND 
IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 

By 

Charles Frederick Holder 

Author of ^'^ Life of Charles Darwin^^'' '"'' Log of a Sea Angler " etc. 
Octavo, with gj Full-Page Illustrations, Net, $j.jo. 

Mr. Holder is a resident of the country of which he writes, and 
has ridden, driven, sailed, tramped, fished, and shot over every 
foot of the forest and sea, plain and mountain, which he describes 
so picturesquely and with such keen delight. He has written this 
book with zest, and the reader finds himself perusing the volume 
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erary punctilio and comes into print in the breezy, jaunty fashion 
with which we fancy his tramping the country with rod or gun. 
His book is a chronicle of sporting experiences that carries along 
with it a good deal of exciting narrative and a considerable 
amount of interesting information in regard to social life, as well 
as the flora and fauna of the country he loves so well. 

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THE 
MYSTIC MID=REQION 

THE DESERTS OF THE SOUTHWEST 
BY 

ARTHUR J. BURDICK 



Octavo, With 54 fuU^'page illustrations. 
Net, $225, By mail, $2,40 



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of the most unique features and interesting localities 
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The deserts offer so many obstacles to research that 
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The Romance of the 
Colorado River : : : 

A Complete Account of the Discovery and of the 
Explorations from 1540 to the Present Time, 
with Particular Reference to the two Voyages of 
Powell through the Line of the Great Canyons 

By Frederick S. Dellenbaugh 

<?°, with 200 Illustrations, net, $3.^0, By mail, SS-TS 



'* As graphic and as interesting as a novel, . . . Of especial value 
to the average reader is the multiplicity of pictures. They occur on 
almost every page, and while the text is always clear, these pictures 
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their remarkable formation, which it would be beyond the power of 
pen to describe. And the color reproduction of the water-color draw- 
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gives some faint idea of the glories of color which have made the 
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Cleveland Leader. 

" His scientific training, his long experience in this region, and his 
eye for natural scenery enable him to make this account of the Col- 
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good can be written for many years to come — not until our knowl- 
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NOV _16 \gg^,^^^,— ^^^^^,^^,^— ,^ 

Breaking the Wilderness 

The story of the Conqiiest of the Far West, from 
the Wanderings of Cabeza de Vaca to the first 
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and traders. 

By Frederick S. Dellenbaugh 

With about 146 illustrations. 8° ^ net $j.SO. 

** Mr. Dellenbaugh has performed here an excellent and valuable 
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*' Taken as a whole the book gives the most comprehensive 
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